OpenText LoadRunner vs autocannon

Quote on request

Free and open source

Licensed by peak virtual users with protocol bundles priced separately. Historically among the most expensive tools in testing.

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

Community edition with a 50-virtual-user limit.

Everything, self-hosted

Established

OpenText · since 1993

Established

OSS community · since 2016

• The broadest protocol coverage available anywhere.
• Extremely mature analysis and correlation tooling.
• Accepted by enterprise architecture and audit functions without argument.

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

• Very expensive, and the protocol-bundle licensing model is hard to predict.
• Dated tooling and a steep learning curve; specialists are a distinct job role.
• Poor fit for continuous, developer-run performance testing.

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

Large enterprises with legacy protocol requirements and an existing performance-engineering team.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.