Gatling is a load and performance testing framework based on Scala and Netty. The first stable release was published on January 13, 2012. In 2015, Gatling's founder, Stéphane Landelle, created a company (named "Gatling Corp"), dedicated to the development of the open-source project. According to Gatling Corp's official website, Gatling was downloaded more than 20,000,000 times (2024). In June 2016, Gatling officially presented Gatling Enterprise the commercial version which included test orchestration and team collaboration features.
The software is designed to be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), and microservices.
Gatling was mentioned twice in ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, in 2013 and 2014, "as a tool worth trying", with an emphasis on "the interesting premise of treating your performance tests as production code".
The latest minor release is Gatling 3.16, published on September 30, 2026.

Company History
Gatling started as an open-source project in 2012 by Stéphane Landelle, while he was the chief technology officer (CTO) of a French IT consulting firm, eBusiness Information. In 2015 a dedicated company named "Gatling Corp" to develop a commercial product for load test orchestration and collaboration. The first version of Gatling Enterprise (originally named FrontLine) was released in 2016.
The company is based in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, near Paris.
Gatling Corp is a member of Systematic Paris-Region, an Île-de-France business cluster created in 2005, devoted to complex systems and ICT. Systematic Paris-Region gathers large groups, SMEs, universities and research labs to promote digital innovation. Gatling is a member of Systematic's Open Source Working Group and was elected member of Systematic's board of directors, as a representative of SMEs, in November 2016.
The company took part in some events, like the Paris Open Source Summit (POSS, 2015, 2016 and 2017 editions), Liferay's 2016 Symposium, Java User Group (JUG)'s meetings, the Paris Gatling User Group and the New York Gatling User Group.

Overview of the Project
Gatling consists of an open-source core and an enterprise orchestration and collaboration platform. The open-source performance testing tool includes:

The high-performance load generator engine
SDKs in multiple programming languages for Java, Scala, Kotlin, JavaScript, and TypeScript.
Static HTML reports
Gatling Enterprise includes all of the open-source features and additionally:

Real-time and interactive reporting
Customized reports and sharing options
Multiple load generator options, from fully managed to self-hosted
Full CI/CD integration
RBAC and SSO
AI features and tooling

Terminology
Simulation: The simulation file includes the different scenarios of a test, its parametrization and the injection profiles. Technically speaking, a simulation is a Scala class. Here are examples of simulations in Java and JavaScript:

Scenario: A scenario consists of a series of requests. Each scenario within a simulation can have its own injection profile. Here is an example of a scenario:

Group: Groups can be used as a subdivision of a scenario. It is also a series of requests, that has a functional purpose (for instance, the login process).
Request: Gatling is able to simulate complex users' behaviors. For this purpose, it generates the appropriate requests in the system under test. Here is an example of a request in Gatling:

Injection profile: An injection profile is the number of virtual users injected during the test in the system under test and how they are injected. Here is an example of an injection profile:

Architecture
Gatling implemented a fully new architecture for a performance testing tool, in order to be more resource efficient. It makes it possible to simulate a high number of requests per second with a single machine.

Components

Recorder
Gatling comes with an HTTP web recorder to bootstrap a simulation. The HTTP recorder can be used to directly capture browser actions or convert .har files to load test scenarios.

Gatling Studio
Gatling Studio is a desktop tool that records browser sessions and converts them into Gatling load test scripts. It captures HTTP interactions — including headers, payloads, and timing — from a live browser session or an imported HAR file, filters out static and third-party requests, and generates Java (Maven) code representing the recorded user flow. The exported project can be run locally with Gatling Community Edition or deployed through Gatling Enterprise Edition.

Domain-specific language
Gatling is provided with a simple and lightweight Domain-specific language, in which simulations and scenarios are coded. This allows users to add custom behavior through many hooks. This makes simulation scripts readable and easy to maintain.
In 2024 Gatling introduced a new DSL (SDK) for JavaScript and TypeScript. The JavaScript and TypeScript SDK uses GraalVM to translate JavaScript code to Java and execute load tests on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Adding JavaScript and TypeScript support made Gatling the first polyglot load testing tool in the market.
This is an example of what Gatling's domain-specific language looks like (see also § Terminology):

Reports
At the end of each test, Gatling generates a static HTML report. Reports include:

Active users over time
Response time distribution
Response time percentiles over time
Requests per second over time
Responses per second over time
Gatling Enterprise additionally includes:

Real-time results
Advanced response metrics
Load generator health metrics
Run trends and comparison tools

AI Insights
Gatling incorporates several AI-assisted features. An IDE plugin can generate test simulations from natural language prompts and convert scripts from tools such as JMeter and LoadRunner. The platform can produce plain-language summaries of completed test runs, highlighting anomalies and regressions. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server allows compatible AI coding agents to configure and launch tests from within a development environment. The platform also supports protocols associated with large language model (LLM) workloads, including Server-Sent Events (SSE) and WebSockets.

Protocols support and plugins
It officially supports the following protocols:

HTTP
WebSockets
Server-sent events
JMS
MQTT
gRPC
GraphQL
Gatling documentation states that it is protocol agnostic, which makes it possible to implement other protocols' support.

Plugins
Gatling comes out with official and community plugins. It integrates with:

Integrated development environments (IDE), like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA
Build automation software, or Build tools, like Apache Maven, Gradle, Npm and sbt
Continuous Integration solutions like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, TeamCity, and Bamboo

Community plugins
Here is a non-exhaustive list of plugins created by community members:

Apache Kafka
Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)
Apache Cassandra
RabbitMQ
SQL
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
ZeroMQ

Continuous integration
Automation with Gatling is related to its simulations' maintainability. The integration with other developer tools, especially in the DevOps lifecycle, makes it possible to create performance tests at scale, that is to say to fully automate the execution of performance testing campaigns in the software development process.

Major and minor releases

Licensing
Gatling is published under Apache License 2.0, a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
The source code is accessible on GitHub.

Gatling Enterprise
Gatling Enterprise is the commercial version of Gatling. It is proprietary software, distributed by Gatling Corp.

See also
Apache JMeter
LoadRunner
Web server benchmarking
Software performance testing
Performance engineering
Software testing
Selenium (software)

References

External links
Official website
Gatling on GitHub