k6 is an open-source, developer-friendly performance testing tool used to load test applications and APIs by scripting tests in JavaScript. It can run locally, in Kubernetes, or via Grafana Cloud k6, using the same script across environments. It supports protocols like HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, and GraphQL, and extends to browser testing, synthetic monitoring, fault injection, and chaos/resilience testing.
What it's for
Load and performance testingStress, spike, soak, and smoke testingEnd-to-end web testing mixing browser and API testingSynthetic monitoring of production environmentsFault injection testing for Kubernetes-based appsInfrastructure testing and capacity planningRegression testing to track performance changesAutomation of performance tests in CI/CD pipelinesChaos and resilience testing
Features 14
- Cookies handling
- End-to-end web testing mixing browser and API testing
- Extensible via xk6 extensions ecosystem
- Fault injection testing for Kubernetes-based apps
- HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, GraphQL protocol support
- Infrastructure testing and bottleneck isolation
- Integrations with developer tools like Postman, New Relic, Visual Studio, Grafana, IntelliJ IDEA, Datadog
- Load testing (stress, spike, soak, smoke tests)
- Regression testing for continuous performance tracking
- Run tests from 21 load zones
- Run tests locally, in Kubernetes, or in the cloud with the same script
- Scripting tests in JavaScript
- Synthetic monitoring reuse of k6 tests
- Threshold configuration for pass/fail criteria
At a glance
free tieropen sourceself-hostable
TypeCLI tool
DeploymentHybrid
PlatformsWeb
Fordevelopers, Site Reliability Engineers, Software Engineers in Test / QA, engineering teams, QA engineers
CompanyGrafana Labs
Integrations
Visual StudioGrafanaPostmanKubernetesAmazon SQSKafkaOpenTelemetryDatadogIntelliJ IDEAPub/SubNew RelicPrometheus
Resources
Pricing
Pricing for Grafana Cloud k6 is not publicly listed.
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