attentionWe've migrated the k6 documentation to Grafana! Click here to view the latest version of the k6 documentation.
This page is still available for users to be able to view the k6 Cloud documentation, and will be removed at a later date.
What is k6?
Grafana k6 is an open-source load testing tool that makes performance testing easy and productive for engineering teams. k6 is free, developer-centric, and extensible.
Using k6, you can test the reliability and performance of your systems and catch performance regressions and problems earlier. k6 will help you to build resilient and performant applications that scale.
k6 is developed by Grafana Labs and the community.
Key features
k6 is packed with features, which you can learn all about in the documentation. Key features include:
Use cases
k6 users are typically Developers, QA Engineers, SDETs, and SREs. They use k6 for testing the performance and reliability of APIs, microservices, and websites. Common k6 use cases are:
Load testing
k6 is optimized for minimal resource consumption and designed for running high load tests (spike, stress, soak tests) .
Browser testing
Through k6 browser, you can run browser-based performance testing and catch issues related to browsers only which can be skipped entirely from the protocol level.
Chaos and resilience testing
You can 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.
Performance and synthetic monitoring
With k6, you can automate and schedule to trigger tests very frequently with a small load to continuously validate the performance and availability of your production environment. You can also use Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring for a managed solution built specifically for synthetic monitoring that supports k6 test scripts.