Artillery
Full-stack performance & reliability testing with load, Playwright E2E, and monitoring.
Artillery is a strong pick for Playwright-heavy teams that want to scale E2E and load testing without juggling multiple tools. Its serverless distributed runners and native OpenTelemetry support make it cloud-native friendly, but the free tier is limited to 30 reports/month. Compared to k6 or Locust, Artillery's Playwright-native approach and Turbo Runner give it an edge for browser-centric testing, though teams needing deep mobile testing should look elsewhere.
Verified 2d ago · liveness 77/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/artillery
- SREs and DevOps engineers needing production-grade load testing and monitoring
- QA teams running large-scale Playwright E2E suites that need faster execution
- Developers wanting a single tool for API load, browser load, and synthetic monitoring
- Teams using serverless infrastructure and wanting cost-efficient distributed testing
- Teams that require a fully no-code testing interface (Artillery is script-based)
- Users needing deep mobile app testing (Artillery focuses on web and API)
- Organizations with strict on-prem compliance, though BYOC is available at a premium
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Skip Artillery if you need a no-code testing tool, deep mobile app testing, or if you can't handle the free tier's 30-report/month limit and need advanced features without paying the Enterprise add-on premium.
The free plan is limited to 30 reports/month and 5 workers per test—exceeding these regularly may put your account in read-only mode, so you'll need to upgrade sooner than expected.
Artillery's pricing fits teams that need both load and E2E testing in one tool. The free tier is good for proof-of-concept, but the $199/month Team plan is competitive against k6's free OSS model if you want managed cloud and Playwright support. The Business plan at $499/month is cost-effective for larger teams, though adding the $1,199/month Enterprise add-on for SSO could make it pricier than alternatives like BlazeMeter or LoadRunner.
In short
Artillery — Full-stack performance & reliability testing with load, Playwright E2E, and monitoring. Best for SREs and DevOps engineers needing production-grade load testing and monitoring, QA teams running large-scale Playwright E2E suites that need faster execution, Developers wanting a single tool for API load, browser load, and synthetic monitoring. Free to start; paid plans from $199/mo.
What's new in Artillery
Checked 2 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 2 feature updates and 3 changelog entries.
Artillery CLI v2.0.34: New ping command, ESM support, TypeScript types, and more
Adds `artillery ping` for HTTP endpoint perf breakdown, full ESM support, improved TypeScript types, --aws-tags flag, and Playwright 1.62.1.
Artillery CLI v2.0.34 fixes relative imports and $rewriteMetricName, bundles fake-data in worker image
Fixes relative import failures in processors, metric renaming in ES modules; bundles fake-data with worker image.
Self-service SSO and SCIM onboarding
Enterprise admins can now start SSO and SCIM onboarding from Artillery Cloud, streamlining identity management.
Artillery CLI v2.0.33: Playwright 1.61, Faker.js replaces Falso
Upgrades Playwright to v1.61.0 and swaps Falso for Faker.js in the fake-data plugin.
Artillery CLI v2.0.32: Playwright 1.60, fixes for timeouts and worker startup
Fixes http.timeout cap, MODULE_NOT_FOUND errors, ECS/Fargate worker startup, and improves trace logging.
What people actually say about Artillery — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
90 mentions across 6 sources (Hacker News, App Store, Bluesky, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Lemmy) · researched Jul 6, 2026.
- +Native Playwright integration for browser-based load testing.
- +Serverless distributed execution on AWS Lambda, Fargate, and Azure.
- +Turbo Runner shards and parallelizes Playwright tests up to 10x faster.
- +CI/CD native with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and PR comment support.
- +OpenTelemetry and W3C Trace Context for backend tracing correlation.
- −Historical memory leak issues in longer tests (2016).
- −Tests can hang indefinitely without exit (2017 report).
- −Remote execution does not populate processEnvironment variables.
- −Limited community data makes reliability assessment difficult.
- −Configuration for Playwright metrics capturing is poorly documented.
- • Distributed runs incur cloud compute costs beyond base subscription.
- • Memory and execution time limits may force users to buy more capacity.
- • No clear free tier limits documented.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Artillery? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: August 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Load testing for HTTP APIs, GraphQL, Socket.IO, and WebSockets
- Playwright-native browser-based load testing: reuse existing Playwright tests
- Turbo Runner (beta): automatic sharding & parallelization for 10x faster E2E suites
- Distributed load testing on AWS Lambda, Fargate, and Azure Container Instances
- Scale to millions of virtual users with built-in cost reporting
- Synthetic checks & monitoring (browser or API) - coming soon; run checks from 12 regions
- Automatic Web Vitals tracking (LCP, CLS, INP) on all pages
- W3C Trace Context propagation for end-to-end tracing (CLI v2.0.31)
- Centralized dashboard with traces, screenshots, and attachments
- GitHub Actions integration with PR comments and branch-linked reports
- Alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, and email
- Query string normalization options to reduce metric cardinality (CLI v2.0.28)
- Self-service SSO and SCIM onboarding (Enterprise, added July 2026)
- artillery ping command for quick HTTP endpoint testing (CLI v2.0.34)
- Full ESM support in processors, plugins, engines, and custom reporters (CLI v2.0.34)
About Artillery
Artillery is a full-stack performance and reliability testing platform that combines load testing, scalable Playwright E2E testing, and synthetic monitoring. Built for developers, QA engineers, and SREs, it lets you verify that apps and APIs stay fast and reliable under real-world conditions. You start with simple HTTP API load tests and incrementally add browser-based scenarios and production monitoring, all defined in YAML or JavaScript. Artillery is designed to scale: distributed load testing runs on your own AWS or Azure account using serverless infrastructure like AWS Lambda, Fargate, and Azure Container Instances, scaling up to millions of virtual users while keeping costs predictable. Existing Playwright tests can be reused for browser-based load testing, and the Turbo Runner (beta) automatically shards and parallelizes large E2E suites for up to 10x faster execution. Recent CLI updates (v2.0.34) add an artillery ping command, full ESM support, and upgrade Playwright to v1.62.1. Artillery tracks Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) on every page automatically. One central dashboard consolidates all test results—load tests, E2E runs, and synthetic checks—with traces, screenshots, and attachments for quick debugging. GitHub Actions integration links test reports directly to PRs and branches, and alerts flow to Slack, PagerDuty, or email. Synthetic checks (coming soon) will allow continuous monitoring of key user journeys from 12 global regions. It integrates with OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, and other observability tools, and supports CI/CD pipelines like GitLab CI, CircleCI, and AWS CodeBuild. With a free tier and paid plans starting at $199/month, Artillery positions itself as a modern alternative to k6 or Locust, particularly for teams needing browser-based testing at scale.
Behind the Verdict
Artillery stands out by unifying load testing, Playwright E2E, and synthetic monitoring under one roof. Its key strength is the ability to reuse existing Playwright tests for load, which removes the need to write separate browser-load scripts. The Turbo Runner (beta) automatically shards and parallelizes large E2E suites, delivering up to 10x faster execution—a real time-saver for teams with extensive Playwright coverage. For load testing, Artillery's distributed approach on AWS Lambda, Fargate, and Azure Container Instances means you can scale to millions of virtual users without managing your own infrastructure. The built-in cost reporting helps you keep AWS spend predictable, and the recent CLI updates (v2.0.34) added an artillery ping command for quick HTTP endpoint checks, full ESM support, and TypeScript type definitions that model the entire test script—great for developers using modern tooling. The centralized dashboard consolidates all results with traces, screenshots, and attachments, making debugging straightforward. GitHub Actions integration links reports to PRs and branches, which fits well into CI/CD workflows. Alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email keep you informed of failures. Weaknesses: the free plan is limited to 30 reports/month, 2 team members, and 5 workers per test—fine for proofs of concept but not for serious use. Advanced features like SSO and audit logs require the Enterprise add-on at $1,199/month extra, which may be a barrier for mid-sized teams. The platform is script-based, so there's no fully no-code UI, which may be a turn-off for non-developers. Synthetic monitoring is still 'coming soon', so you can't fully replace a dedicated monitoring tool yet. Artillery is a good fit for SREs, DevOps engineers, and QA teams that are comfortable with YAML/JavaScript and want a single tool for load and E2E. It's particularly strong for teams already using Playwright and looking to scale their testing. It may not suit teams needing deep mobile testing (it's web/API focused) or those requiring on-prem deployment without paying the BYOC premium.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Artillery actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
I need to load test a new API endpoint before launch. I already have a Playwright test for the key user flow.
Outcome: With Artillery, I reuse the existing Playwright test, deploy it to AWS Lambda via the CLI (artillery run-lambda), and get a report showing Web Vitals and throughput in minutes. The dashboard lets me share results with the team.
Our Playwright E2E suite takes 2 hours to run, slowing down CI. We need faster feedback.
Outcome: I enable Turbo Runner (beta) to shard and parallelize the suite across cloud runners, cutting execution time to ~15 minutes. The GitHub Actions integration posts a comment to the PR with the test report link.
We need to continuously monitor a critical user journey in production and get alerts.
Outcome: I create a synthetic check using the same Playwright script, schedule it on a cron via the CLI, and receive Slack alerts if a step fails. The central dashboard shows performance trends over time.
Use Cases
- Run a distributed load test against your production API from 12 global regions to validate scalability before a product launch.
- Reuse existing Playwright E2E tests as load tests to simulate thousands of concurrent users performing real browser interactions.
- Continuously monitor key user journeys with synthetic checks in CI and on a cron schedule, getting alerts via Slack or PagerDuty.
- Integrate Artillery with GitHub Actions to automatically run load tests on every pull request and post results as PR comments.
- Export OpenTelemetry traces from Artillery to Datadog to correlate load test performance with backend spans.
- Use the Artillery Stash API to programmatically retrieve test reports and embed performance dashboards in your internal tools.
- Accelerate a large Playwright E2E suite using the Turbo Runner to shard and parallelize across cloud runners.
Limitations
- The free plan caps at 30 reports/month, 2 team members, 5 workers per distributed test, 30-minute test duration, and 25 test cases per E2E report.
- Data retention is limited: 1 month free, 6 months Team, 18 months Business.
- Advanced features like SSO and audit logs are locked behind the Enterprise add-on (starting at $1,199/mo).
- The platform requires scripting (YAML/JavaScript); there is no full no-code UI.
as of 2026-08-21
Verification history
We have re-verified Artillery 5 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Artillery tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Hobbyists, students, and proof-of-concept projects that need to validate Artillery's approach with minimal commitment—suitable for sporadic testing and up to 2 team members.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: offers 30 reports/month, 1 month data retention, 2 team members, up to 5 distributed workers, and tests up to 30 minutes—an entry point to explore the platform.
Team
$199/mo
Ideal for
Small to mid-sized teams running regular load and E2E tests, needing more reports and longer test durations, and wanting features like shareable reports and custom charts.
What this tier adds
Adds 1000 reports/month (up from 30), 6 months data retention, up to 8 team members, up to 25 workers per test, 2-hour test duration, and Slack Connect (annual plan).
Business
$499/mo
Ideal for
Larger teams or organizations with high test volume and advanced requirements like the Stash API, spend controls, and no limits on workers or duration.
What this tier adds
Adds 2500 reports/month, 18 months data retention, no limits on team members, workers, or test duration, plus Stash API, spend & volume controls, and workspaces.
Enterprise add-ons
From $1,199/mo
Ideal for
Enterprises with strict compliance and governance needs requiring SSO, audit logs, support SLAs, and the ability to deploy in their own AWS account.
What this tier adds
Adds Enterprise SSO (OIDC & SAML), audit logs, custom MSA, support SLAs, and BYOC (deploy to your own AWS account), starting at $1,199/month.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Artillery's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Artillery's pricing fits teams that need both load and E2E testing in one tool. The free tier is good for proof-of-concept, but the $199/month Team plan is competitive against k6's free OSS model if you want managed cloud and Playwright support. The Business plan at $499/month is cost-effective for larger teams, though adding the $1,199/month Enterprise add-on for SSO could make it pricier than alternatives like BlazeMeter or LoadRunner.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Artillery — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For a developer familiar with YAML/JavaScript, you can run your first load test within 10 minutes using `npm install -g artillery` and `artillery run`. Reusing an existing Playwright test for load takes about 15 minutes. Setting up distributed testing on AWS Lambda or Fargate might take 30-60 minutes for first-time users. Synthetic monitoring, once available, will require similar setup.
Switching to or from Artillery
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From k6: Import your k6 scripts and convert them to Artillery YAML—it's a straightforward mapping for HTTP scenarios. The CLI supports running tests on AWS Lambda, which can reduce infrastructure costs.
- →From Locust: You can write Artillery YAML or use JavaScript to replicate your Locust behavior. Artillery's Playwright support lets you migrate browser-based tests alongside.
- →From JMeter: JMX files need conversion, but Artillery's YAML is simpler and more maintainable. You can gradually move tests while keeping JMeter for legacy suites.
- →From Postman/Newman: Use Artillery's HTTP engine to translate Postman collections into load tests, reusing the same endpoints and assertions.
- ↗To k6: Export Artillery test scripts as YAML and adapt them to k6's JavaScript syntax—you'll need to rewrite configurations, but the concepts are similar. You'll lose Playwright-native browser testing.
- ↗To Grafana k6 Cloud: If you need a fully managed cloud with advanced reporting, you can replicate Artillery tests in k6 and use its cloud for distributed runs.
- ↗To Datadog Synthetic Monitoring: For production monitoring, you can migrate your synthetic checks to Datadog's browser tests, which integrate natively with Datadog's observability stack.
- ↗To Cypress: If you want a dedicated E2E tool with a different execution model, you can export your Playwright tests to Cypress, though load testing isn't a core feature.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
Official links
Tools that pair well with Artillery
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Artillery, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Artillery vs Voyage Ai
Voyage AI and Artillery solve entirely different problems: Voyage AI is a specialized embedding and reranker service for RAG pipelines, while Artillery is a comprehensive testing platform for load, E2E, and synthetic monitoring. Your choice depends on whether your primary need is improving retrieval accuracy in enterprise applications or ensuring application performance and reliability.
Artillery vs Spider Cloud
Choose Artillery if you need a unified load testing, E2E, and synthetic monitoring platform for web apps and APIs — ideal for SREs and QA teams requiring serverless scaling and CI/CD integration. Pick Spider Cloud if your priority is fast, low-cost web crawling/scraping for AI agents or RAG pipelines, with recent Browser AI commands adding interactive automation. They solve fundamentally different problems, so your decision hinges on whether you're testing performance or extracting data.
Artillery vs Temporal Ai
Choose Temporal.ai if you need bulletproof orchestration for AI agents or microservices that must survive failures without losing state. Choose Artillery if your priority is performance testing, synthetic monitoring, and CI/CD-integrated load testing—especially for browser-based scenarios with Playwright. They solve different problems; the decision is about reliability vs. performance verification.
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