Locust vs NeoLoad

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.

Everything, self-hosted

Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.

Widely used

OSS community · since 2011

Established

Tricentis · since 2005

• 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.

• Handles enterprise protocols such as SAP GUI and Citrix that open-source tools cannot.
• APM correlation makes root-cause analysis much faster than latency graphs alone.
• Both GUI design and as-code authoring, so mixed-skill teams can share a suite.

• 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.

• Expensive, with a procurement-scale sales process.
• Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
• Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.

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

Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.