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GATLING  VS  LOADRUNNER

The modern performance platform your whole team can own

Gatling extends enterprise load testing into modern engineering workflows. Code-native, cloud-ready, and built for teams that can't afford blind spots between releases.
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An Established Enterprise Tool
vs a Continuous Performance Intelligence Platform

Centralized, specialist-run performance testing made sense before DevOps. Continuous, team-owned load testing is how modern engineering organizations ship with confidence.

LoadRunner

A proven enterprise standard. Your performance team's tool,
but rarely your developers'.

Gatling

The same engineering rigor, extended to every team and every release cycle.

Proprietary scripting language with a steep, specialist-only learning curve

Heavy client architecture requiring significant infrastructure to operate at scale

Centralized team model — development teams depend on experts to run tests

Not designed for CI/CD — pipeline integration requires significant manual setup

Code-first: Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Scala, Kotlin

Async engine: millions of Virtual Users on a single machine

Every modern protocol built in — HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSockets, GraphQL, and more

Native CI/CD integration: GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and more

FEATURE HIGHLIGHT

Reduce risk with Gatling.
Welcome to Continuous Performance Intelligence.

Gatling isn't a replacement for your performance discipline. It's the platform that lets you apply it continuously, across every team, without losing the depth you've built.

AI capabilities

Automated run summaries, IDE-native MCP server integration, and a LoadRunner migration skill — built to meet engineers where they already work, without dismantling the coverage you've built in VuGen.

SLOs and compliance scoring

Define your response time and error rate targets once. Every run returns a compliance score — a precise percentage your engineering leadership can track across every release. No specialist needed to interpret the output.

Test as code

Your existing LoadRunner coverage encodes years of domain knowledge. Gatling brings that knowledge into your repository — versioned, reviewable, and executable by any team on any CI run — without losing what you've built.

Performance trends across every release

Gatling gives you a continuous performance record across every release. Regressions surface before production, not after. Leadership gets visibility without a specialist standing between the data and the decision.

Gatling vs LoadRunner
Feature-by-feature comparison

Gatling

LoadRunner

Edge

Architecture model
and performance

Concurrency model

Resource efficiency

Modern protocol support

Legacy protocol support

Non-blocking, Netty-based async, Millions of VUs with minimal resources
10-20× more efficient at equivalent load levels
HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTPS, WebSockets, gRPC, GraphQL, MQTT, JDBC, JMS, SSE
Mainframe not supported
Thread-per-user model, CPU/RAM intensive at high concurrency
Requires significant infrastructure investment to run at scale
HTTP, TLS, JDBC
SAP, Siebel, Citrix, RDP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
LoadRunner

Developer experience

Test scripting

IDE support

Learning curve

GitOps

Team autonomy

5 SDKS: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Scala
3 options: No-code, Low-code, As-code
IntelliJ, VS Code, Cursor, Eclipse, Windsurf, full autocomplete and type-checking
Familiar for developers — plain code, no proprietary concepts
First-class — scripts are code, committed alongside app code
Development teams can own and run tests independently
Proprietary C-based scripting in VuGen — specialist-only
VuGen desktop client — no IDE integration
Steep. Often requires dedicated training or external consultants
Not designed for version control — script reusability is a known challenge
Centralized performance team or CoE model — developers depend on specialists
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling

CI/CD pipeline

Pipeline integration

Assertions & thresholds

First-class Maven/Gradle plugins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
Inline assertions in code — breaks build if SLOs are missed
Not natively designed for DevOps — requires significant manual setup
Not designed for automated pipeline gating
Gatling
Gatling

Enterprise
& team

Distributed load

Maintenance overhead

Managed in Gatling Enterprise — no manual cluster setup
Low — tests refactored alongside code
Controller/Agent/Load Generator architecture — infrastructure-heavy
High — client management, agent patching, complex upgrades
Gatling
Gatling

Test Architecture
& Deployment

Load-test-as-a-service (SaaS)

Hybrid SaaS

Self-managed
load generators

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes — LoadRunner Cloud available
No
Yes
Tied
Gatling
Tied

MODERN PRactices

Shift-left testing

DevOps

Maintainability

Tests run on every PR as part of the build pipeline
DevSecOps-native
Easy — versionable, refactorable, code-native
Specialist-led, typically a dedicated pre-release phase
Not natively designed for DevOps workflows
Challenging at scale — script reuse is a known pain point
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling

AI readiness

Load Test LLMs and AI Apps

AI pair programming

MCP Server

AI Analysis & Insights

Continuous Performance Intelligence

AI-powered Docs

Migration Assistant

Test Campaign Assistant

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Soon (2026)
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling
Gatling

Products & licensing

Organization

Open source

Guarantees

Total cost of ownership

Gatling Corp (2015)
Pure player in Load Testing
40 people
Apache License 2.0
Open-source core & Commercial license. Enterprise support, SLAs, advisory services, and feature co-development

Lower engineering overhead — faster onboarding, broader team ownership
OpenText — large enterprise software portfolio
Fully proprietary
Enterprise licensing — contact sales for pricing
High licensing cost, infrastructure requirements, and specialist dependency
/
Gatling
/
Gatling

Why engineering teams
switch to Gatling

This year we rewrote our simulations in JavaScript so the whole team could really take ownership. It’s the most accessible language for our developers; and in e-commerce, we use it every day,

Alexandre Baert
Pre-production Platform Manager, Nickel

Compared to other options, Gatling Enterprise Edition has helped us streamline performance testing with JS. It gave us visibility into key metrics we can now measure and improve, which helps us enhance our product for our customers.

Pierre-Yves Gautier
Product Manager Observability, SNCF Connect

Gatling Enterprise has been a game-changer for our performance testing. The ability to simulate real-world loads and automatically test our platform’s response to high traffic has ensured that we maintain top performance, even as our business grows.

Pierre Pommerel
Solution Architect, Sonepar

Ready to
make the switch?

See how your existing LoadRunner scripts map to Gatling — and what you gain on the other side.

 Evaluate your migration
 Evaluate your migration

Your all-in-one load testing platform

Design complex tests, manage global infrastructure, and turn results into action on one powerful platform.

Need technical references and tutorials?

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