Gremlin vs Toxiproxy
Gremlin
gremlin.comToxiproxy
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Gremlin | Toxiproxy |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $3,750/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 1 |
| Spec score · Chaos Engineering Platforms | 9.0 (#1) | 8.2 (#8) |
| API | The public REST API uses the base URL https://api.gremlin.com/v1 and has an OpenAPI specification. | The HTTP API supports creating, updating, listing, and deleting proxies and toxics, resetting proxies, and retrieving version and Prometheus-compatible metrics. |
| Intended users | Gremlin describes its users as SRE and platform teams, and says financial services, retail, media, and B2B SaaS companies use the product. | The project is aimed at developers and teams testing service failure handling in development, unit and integration tests, and CI. |
| License | Gremlin's commercial reliability platform is not offered as an open-source product; a G2 reviewer specifically notes that no open-source version is available. | The GitHub repository identifies the project license as MIT. |
| Purpose | Gremlin helps engineering teams find failure modes, fix them, and validate reliability before failures become outages. | Toxiproxy is a TCP proxy for simulating network and system conditions in chaos and resiliency testing. |
| Security | Gremlin states it is SOC 2 Type II certified and encrypts data in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256. | The HTTP API is unauthenticated by default and can create proxies to arbitrary upstreams; the project advises against exposing it to untrusted networks and supports bearer token authentication. |
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
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.
Toxiproxy
Toxiproxy is a free, open-source TCP proxy for testing how software responds to network and system problems in development, testing, and CI. Applications route test connections through it, then users change connection behavior through an HTTP API or command-line interface. Built-in toxics can add latency or jitter, restrict bandwidth, delay socket closure, time out or reset connections, slice TCP data, limit transmitted data, or drop packets. Settings support deterministic connection changes as well as randomized chaos. The API manages proxies and toxics, resets proxies, and returns version information and Prometheus-compatible metrics. It listens on port 8474; configuring a proxy with listen port 0 assigns an ephemeral port. Client libraries are listed for Ruby, Go, Python, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Java, Haskell, Rust, and Elixir. Installation options include Linux packages and binaries, Homebrew and MacPorts, a Windows download, a container image, and building from source with Go. The project identifies its license as MIT. Its HTTP API is unauthenticated by default, though bearer-token authentication is supported.