Artillery vs Loadster Synthetic Monitoring

Artillery combines load testing, scalable Playwright end-to-end testing, and production monitoring in one toolkit. It supports load, stress, and soak tests, including distributed runs across AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and Azure Container Instances. HTTP, WebSocket, and Socket.IO are built in, with other protocols available through plugins. Playwright scripts can run as load tests or synthetic checks; the homepage also describes a Turbo runner beta for splitting large Playwright suites into parallel work. Listed integrations include Datadog, OpenTelemetry, New Relic, Splunk, Honeycomb, AWS CloudWatch, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, CircleCI, and Azure DevOps. Artillery says its typical users include application developers, test and QA engineers, and operations or SRE teams responsible for production backend systems. Cloud reporting is opt-in per test run, while tests run in the user's own environment even when reports are sent to Artillery Cloud. The Free plan lists 30 reports per month; Team costs $199 a month and includes 1,000 reports per month. Continued overages may degrade service or lead to read-only mode.

Loadster Synthetic Monitoring runs scheduled scripted checks against websites, web apps, and APIs from outside a user’s infrastructure. A monitor can check one page or endpoint, or follow a multi-step journey such as logging in, navigating pages, and submitting a form. Scripts can use Browser Bots, Protocol Bots, or Playwright Test in JavaScript or TypeScript. Check schedules range from every minute to every day.

The product page lists eight dedicated monitoring locations across five continents, and one monitor can use several locations. Browser Bot and Playwright checks automatically collect TTFB, FCP, LCP, and CLS timing metrics. Monitoring cycles retain logs and detailed traces; browser checks include screenshots, while Protocol Bot checks capture request and response details. Alerts can go through email, SMS, phone calls, webhooks, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and VictorOps. By default, one failed cycle opens an incident and one passing cycle resolves it, though the failure threshold can be raised. Hosted status pages can share selected status and uptime history privately or publicly, with custom domains when the customer controls DNS. Monitors can also run from a self-hosted Loadster Engine.