k6 is a modern load testing tool for developers and testers in the DevOps era.
It’s built to be powerful, extensible, and full-featured. k6 allows you to prevent performance issues and proactively improve reliability. It helps engineering teams prevent errors and SLO breaches, enabling them to build resilient and high-performing applications that scale.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Load and performance testing – optimized for minimal resource consumption and designed for running high-load performance tests such as spike, stress, or soak tests.
- Browser performance testing – run browser-based performance tests and collect browser metrics to identify performance issues related to browsers.
- Performance and synthetic monitoring – schedule tests to run with minimal load very frequently, continuously validating the performance and availability of your production environment.
- Chaos and resilience testing – use k6 to simulate traffic as part of your chaos experiments, trigger them from your k6 tests or inject different types of faults in Kubernetes with xk6-disruptor.
- Configurable load generation. Even lower-end machines can simulate lots of traffic.
- Tests as code. Reuse scripts, modularize logic, version control, and integrate tests with your CI.
- A full-featured API. The scripting API is packed with features that help you simulate real application traffic.
- An embedded JavaScript engine. The performance of Go, the scripting familiarity of JavaScript.
Multiple Protocol support. HTTP, WebSockets, gRPC, Browser, and more. - Large extension ecosystem. k6 extensions lets you create custom k6 binaries to support your specific reliability-testing needs:
- JavaScript extensions extend the JavaScript APIs available to your test scripts. Add support for new network protocols, improve performance compared to equivalent JS libraries, or add features.
- Output extensions send metrics to a custom file format or service. Add custom processing and dispatching.
- Flexible metrics storage and visualization. Summary statistics or granular metrics, exported to the service of your choice.
- Native integration with Grafana cloud. SaaS solution for test execution, metrics correlation, data analysis, and more.
Website: github.com/grafana/k6
Support:
Developer: Grafana Labs
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

k6 is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Server Benchmarking Tools | |
|---|---|
| Locust | Easy to use, scriptable and scalable performance testing tool |
| Apache JMeter | Load testing and performance measurement application |
| k6 | Modern load testing tool for developers and testers in the DevOps era |
| wrk | Modern HTTP benchmarking tool |
| Siege | HTTP regression testing and benchmarking utility |
| AutoCannon | Fast HTTP/1.1 benchmarking tool |
| Tsung | Multi-protocol distributed load testing tool |
| bombardier | Uses fasthttp instead of Go’s default http library, |
| ApacheBench | Apache (and other web servers) benchmark tool |
| Cassowary | Modern HTTP/S, intuitive & cross-platform load testing tool built in Go |
| Drill | HTTP load testing application written in Rust |
| httperf | HTTP load generator |
| FunkLoad | Web testing tool in the same spirit as Perl's WWW::Mechanize |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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Website shoud be
Link corrected, thanks.