Grafana k6 vs Apache JMeter vs Gatling

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

Free and open source

From €89 per month (indicative, Enterprise Cloud entry)

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.

Open source is free; Enterprise adds distributed injectors and reporting, billed by virtual-user-hours.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

Category standard

Apache Software Foundation · since 1998

Widely used

Gatling Corp · since 2012

• 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.

• Very high throughput per load generator thanks to the async architecture.
• Code-first scenarios that review, diff and refactor properly.
• The default HTML report is genuinely good enough to hand to a stakeholder.

• 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.

• Historically Scala-first; the Java and JavaScript DSLs are newer and less documented.
• Fewer protocols than JMeter.
• Distributed load without the enterprise product means building your own orchestration.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.

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

JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.