ChaosBlade vs Gremlin
ChaosBlade
chaosblade.io
Gremlin
gremlin.comSide by side
| Figure | ChaosBlade | Gremlin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $3,750/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 8 |
| Spec score · Chaos Engineering Platforms | 8.2 (#7) | 9.0 (#1) |
| Founded | 2019 | Gremlin says it was founded in 2016 by Kolton Andrus, who previously built fault injection at Amazon. |
| Integrations | ChaosBlade-Box uses Helm for deployment management and integrates Prometheus monitoring. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, GCP, Jira and configurable REST webhooks. |
| Intended users | The project describes its goal as helping enterprises improve system availability during cloud-native adoption. | Gremlin describes its users as SRE and platform teams, and says financial services, retail, media, and B2B SaaS companies use the product. |
| Purpose | The project aims to help enterprises address high-availability problems during cloud-native adoption through chaos engineering. | Gremlin helps engineering teams find failure modes, fix them, and validate reliability before failures become outages. |
| Safety controls | ChaosBlade-Box describes manual stopping and automatic stopping through a configured timeout as policies to help ensure drills are resumed. | Gremlin supports blast radius controls and automatic halt and rollback of experiments if issues arise. |
Plans
Gremlin
- Gremlin 30-day trialFree
- Gremlin Platform trialFree
- Gremlin Reliability Management Platform on AWS Marketplace$45,000 a year
- Fault injection suitePriced on request
- Fault injection suite (stand-alone)Priced on request
- Gremlin Foresight AIPriced on request
- Gremlin PlatformPriced on request
- Professional ServicesPriced on request
In their own words
ChaosBlade
ChaosBlade is a free, open-source chaos engineering project comprising the ChaosBlade experiment tool and the ChaosBlade-Box platform. Its stated aim is to help enterprises address availability problems during cloud-native adoption. Experiments cover CPU, memory, network, disk, processes, kernels, and files, as well as multilingual applications and Kubernetes resources. They can run through the command-line interface, Kubernetes YAML and CRDs, HTTP server calls, or the Box interface. ChaosBlade-Box provides a shared experiment interface, automates deployment of experiment tools, and can host ChaosBlade and LitmusChaos. It uses Helm for deployment management and integrates Prometheus monitoring. Safety policies support manual stopping or automatic stopping after a configured timeout. Users can download and unpack the CLI on a host, or install the tool and platform on Kubernetes with Helm. The host installation guide lists Java and MySQL requirements; automatic probe installation also needs Ansible and expect. The project supports Kubernetes and is identified as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project.
Gremlin
Gremlin is a chaos engineering platform for engineering teams seeking failure modes and ways to validate reliability before failures become outages. It injects faults into services, hosts, containers, and serverless workloads so teams can examine system responses. Blast radius controls limit experiments, which can halt and roll back automatically if issues arise. Teams can sequence experiments into incident scenarios, schedule them, and use GameDay Manager to prepare, run, analyze, and store results. The platform also includes dependency discovery, standardized test suites and reliability scores, disaster recovery testing, detected risks, and organization-wide benchmarking. Documented integrations include Slack, Datadog, Dynatrace, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Grafana Cloud k6, Jira, and custom webhooks. Supported environments include public clouds, Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, and on-premises deployments through self-hosted Private Edition. Gremlin states that it is SOC 2 Type II certified and encrypts data in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256. A 30-day trial is available without a credit card and does not auto-convert. Platform pricing is by custom quote per service; agents, targets, and test volume are sized during the pricing conversation.