Grafana k6 vs Apache JMeter

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. Costs are load-generator infrastructure and, commonly, a cloud execution service such as BlazeMeter.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

Category standard

Apache Software Foundation · since 1998

• 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.

• Protocol coverage no modern tool matches — JDBC, JMS, LDAP, mainframe-adjacent protocols.
• GUI test-plan building is accessible to testers who do not code.
• Enormous body of documentation, plugins and available expertise.

• 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.

• Thread-per-user model is memory-hungry; high load needs a cluster where k6 needs one box.
• JMX test plans are XML that merges terribly in version control.
• The GUI must not be used for actual load generation, which trips up nearly every beginner.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.

Enterprise performance teams needing protocol breadth and a GUI-based workflow.