// the find
artilleryio/artillery
The complete load testing platform. Everything you need for production-grade load tests. Serverless & distributed. Load test with Playwright. Load test HTTP APIs, GraphQL, WebSocket, and more. Use any Node.js module.
Artillery is a load testing tool that covers HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, Socket.io, and real browser sessions via Playwright. It runs locally or distributes across AWS Lambda/Fargate with no infrastructure setup. Aimed at teams that want CI-integrated load testing without spinning up a dedicated testing cluster.
The serverless distribution story is genuinely good — you can run a 100k req/min test from Lambda without provisioning anything, and it's free for AWS targets. Playwright integration is real: it spawns actual headless browsers, so you catch issues that pure HTTP testing misses (JS rendering, auth flows, CDN edge behavior). The YAML scenario format handles request chaining, CSV data, and token refresh without needing custom code for common cases. OpenTelemetry support means test metrics can land in the same observability stack as production, which makes correlating load test results with traces actually practical.
The BSL license on Azure modules is a trap — you can prototype on Azure for free but production use requires a paid license, and that carve-out is buried in a separate LICENSE-BSL.txt. The monorepo is a JavaScript package sprawl with 20+ plugins of varying quality and maintenance; some haven't been touched in years and the plugin API isn't versioned. Playwright load testing is expensive in wall-clock time and cost: 50 real browsers on Lambda add up fast, and there's no built-in cost estimator. YAML-based scenario definitions work fine for simple flows but get unwieldy for complex stateful behavior — at that point you're writing custom processor functions anyway, which means you're essentially back to writing test code.