About
Artillery is a comprehensive, developer-first platform designed to keep applications fast, reliable, and production-ready. It unifies three core capabilities — scalable Playwright end-to-end (E2E) testing, distributed load testing, and synthetic monitoring — into a single toolkit that teams can adopt incrementally. With Artillery's Playwright-native load testing, teams can reuse existing Playwright scripts to simulate tens of thousands of headless browsers and capture Web Vitals metrics automatically. Load tests can scale to millions of virtual users using serverless infrastructure on AWS or Azure, with built-in cost reporting for every test run. The platform's Turbo Runner (beta) accelerates large Playwright test suites up to 10x through automatic sharding and parallelization. A central dashboard aggregates all test results, integrates with GitHub Actions for PR comments, and links test reports back to branches for streamlined debugging. Artillery is explicitly built to work with AI coding agents — prompts are available to help agents write, analyze, and debug tests. Synthetic monitoring supports continuous checks on key user journeys via browser-based or API checks, with alerting via email, Slack, or PagerDuty across 12 global regions. Used by enterprises such as Okta and Evervault, Artillery is trusted for high-stakes reliability requirements, having helped teams scale to two million concurrent players. It supports HTTP APIs, GraphQL, Socket.IO, and more out of the box.
Key Features
- Scalable Playwright E2E Testing: Run and debug Playwright E2E tests faster at scale with a Turbo Runner that parallelizes and shards large test suites up to 10x, on Artillery's cloud or your own AWS/Azure infrastructure.
- Distributed Load Testing: Load test HTTP APIs, GraphQL services, Socket.IO apps, and more at scale — up to millions of virtual users — using pay-as-you-go serverless infrastructure with built-in cost reporting.
- Playwright-Native Browser Load Testing: Reuse existing Playwright scripts for browser-based load testing, automatically capturing Web Vitals metrics across tens of thousands of headless browsers.
- Synthetic Monitoring & Alerting: Continuously monitor key user journeys with browser or API checks across 12 global regions, with alerts via email, Slack, or PagerDuty.
- AI & Coding Agent Integration: Built to work with AI coding agents — Artillery provides ready-made prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to write, analyze, and debug load tests autonomously.
Use Cases
- Load testing a high-traffic API before a major product launch to ensure it can handle peak concurrent users without degradation.
- Running large Playwright E2E test suites in CI/CD pipelines with automatic parallelization to cut test execution time by up to 10x.
- Continuously monitoring key production user journeys across multiple global regions to catch performance regressions and downtime early.
- Using AI coding agents to automatically write, run, and analyze load tests as part of an automated software delivery workflow.
- Stress testing multiplayer game backends or real-time applications like Socket.IO services to validate reliability at massive scale.
Pros
- All-in-One Reliability Platform: Combines load testing, E2E testing, and production monitoring in a single toolkit, reducing tool sprawl and enabling shared test code across workflows.
- AI & Coding Agent Ready: Explicitly designed to integrate with AI coding agents, with first-class prompts and rich context to help agents investigate and fix performance issues.
- Massive Scale on Your Own Infrastructure: Distributed load testing runs on your own AWS or Azure account using serverless infrastructure, enabling millions of virtual users without vendor lock-in.
- Deep CI/CD Integration: Native GitHub Actions support with automatic PR comments, test reports linked to branches, and OpenTelemetry integration for seamless DevOps pipelines.
Cons
- Synthetic Monitoring Still in Beta: The synthetic checks and monitoring feature is listed as 'coming soon,' meaning it may not be fully available for all users yet.
- Infrastructure Setup Required for Scale: Running distributed load tests at massive scale requires AWS or Azure account configuration, which adds complexity for smaller teams or those without cloud infrastructure.
- Primarily Developer-Focused: Artillery is CLI- and code-first, which may present a steeper learning curve for QA teams or non-developers who prefer low-code or no-code testing tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Artillery and what can it do?
Artillery is a full-stack performance and reliability testing platform. It supports scalable Playwright E2E testing, distributed load testing for APIs and web apps, and synthetic production monitoring — all from a single toolkit.
Can I reuse my existing Playwright tests with Artillery?
Yes. Artillery is Playwright-native, meaning you can reuse your existing Playwright scripts for both E2E testing and browser-based load testing without rewriting them.
How does distributed load testing work in Artillery?
Artillery uses your own AWS or Azure account with pay-as-you-go serverless infrastructure to run distributed tests. This lets you scale to millions of virtual users while keeping cloud costs transparent with built-in cost reporting.
Does Artillery integrate with CI/CD and monitoring tools?
Yes. Artillery has native GitHub Actions integration with automatic PR comments, OpenTelemetry support for observability pipelines, and alerting via email, Slack, or PagerDuty for production monitoring.
Is Artillery free to use?
Artillery offers a free sign-up tier. The CLI is open source, and Artillery Cloud provides additional features for teams at scale. Pricing tiers are available for larger workloads and enterprise needs.
