Grafana k6 vs autocannon

From $19 per month (indicative, Grafana Cloud k6 entry)

Free and open source

Self-hosted is free and unlimited. Cloud plans are billed by virtual-user-hours, which is where budgets go.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

The k6 CLI is fully open source with no virtual-user limits when self-run.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

Established

OSS community · since 2016

• Excellent resource efficiency — thousands of virtual users from one modest machine.
• Thresholds make performance a build gate rather than a report nobody reads.
• Native Grafana and Prometheus integration ties load results to server-side metrics.

• Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
• Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
• Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.

• The JavaScript runtime is not Node — no npm modules unless bundled, which surprises people.
• Browser-level load testing exists but is much heavier and less mature than protocol-level testing.
• Distributed execution requires either the cloud product or your own orchestration.

• Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
• No distributed execution.
• HTTP/1.1 focused.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.