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 |
| oha | CLI HTTP load generator with a real-time terminal user interface |
| hey | CLI load generator for benchmarking web applications and HTTP services |
| 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 |
| Nighthawk | Layer 7 performance-characterisation and load-testing tool |
| httperf | HTTP load generator |
| FunkLoad | Web testing tool in the same spirit as Perl's WWW::Mechanize |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
LinuxLinks helps you discover the best free and open source software for Linux. Explore our extensive collection of recommended applications, including alternatives to popular proprietary software.We also publish software reviews, Linux tutorials, hardware reviews, free programming books and articles covering the wider open source community. Browse our Linux resources to discover more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application we haven't covered? Suggest a program for inclusion. Has your software been featured on LinuxLinks? Display one of our Featured on LinuxLinks badges on your website or GitHub README. |


Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Website shoud be
Link corrected, thanks.