Artillery vs Locust

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.

Locust is an open-source performance and load testing tool for HTTP and other protocols. Test scenarios are written in Python, with regular Python libraries available for use within them. Tests can run from the command line or web interface, which displays throughput, response times, and errors in real time; results can be exported for later analysis. The interface shows progress and lets users change load during a run. Locust can distribute tests across multiple machines and says it can support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Other systems and protocols can be tested by adding a client, and documentation lists community extensions for protocols and reporting. Optional OpenTelemetry support exports traces, metrics, and logs to compatible backends such as OTLP, Prometheus, Jaeger, and Tempo. Automatic instrumentation currently covers the requests library. Installation is documented with pip install locust or uvx. Locust is free and MIT-licensed. Its documentation also describes hosted load testing through Azure Load Testing, with reporting, Application Insights integration, and CI/CD support for Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.