Locust vs Artillery

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

LocustArtillery

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

MPL-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Python

JavaScriptTypeScriptCodeless

Platforms

APIWeb

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

OSS community · since 2011

Widely used

Artillery Software · since 2015

Strengths

Test scenarios are plain Python, so any logic is expressible without workarounds.
Distributed mode is conceptually simple and works well on Kubernetes.
Live web UI is useful during an exploratory ramp-up.

Distributed load on your own AWS account, so no per-virtual-user vendor pricing at all.
Reuses Playwright scripts for browser-level load without rewriting journeys.
YAML for simple scenarios, JavaScript when you need real logic.

Limitations

Python's per-user overhead is higher than k6 or Gatling; big loads need more machines.
Reporting is basic — plan on exporting to Grafana.
HTTP-centric; other protocols require writing your own client.

Best for

Python teams who want load scenarios expressed in their own language.

AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.