A free GTmetrix alternative

What GTmetrix does better than us

• The waterfall chart. Genuinely excellent, and we do not have one. If you need to see request-by-request timing, which file blocked which, where the gaps are and what the response headers were, GTmetrix is the better tool and it is not close.
• Video playback of the load. Frame-by-frame, with the ability to step through. Nothing explains a slow page to a non-technical stakeholder faster.
• Multiple test locations and devices. Test from seven regions, different browsers, specified connection speeds, and with an ad blocker on or off. We run one configuration: a mid-range phone on throttled 4G.
• Scheduled monitoring and alerts. Daily or weekly re-tests with historical graphs and email when a page regresses. We do not do monitoring at all in this version.
• Saved history. Every test kept against your account so you can compare before and after. Our results expire after 30 days and there is no account to attach them to.

What we do better

• We lead with a fix, not a grade. GTmetrix hands you a letter grade and a list of audits. That is a diagnosis in a language you have to learn first. We open with a plain sentence naming the single change that recovers the most time.
• We put a number on what it is worth. Not a precise one — it is a model and we label it as one on every result — but enough to argue for the work with somebody who does not care what LCP stands for.
• We only mention hosting when hosting is the problem. Our hosting suggestion appears when your measured server response exceeds 600ms and never otherwise. If your problem is a 2 MB hero image, we will not sell you a server.
• No account, no free-tier limit. GTmetrix’s better features sit behind a login and a paid plan. Everything here is free and anonymous.
• Real field data, called directly. We query Google’s Chrome UX Report ourselves and clearly separate it from the lab run, including telling you when there isn’t any and why that is normal.

Which to use

Use GTmetrix when you are debugging: you already know the page is slow, you need the waterfall to find out precisely why, and you want to watch the filmstrip. Also use it if you need ongoing monitoring, since we do not offer any.

Use this when you need to decide what to do next, or to explain to somebody else why it matters. It is a triage tool, not a debugger.

They are not really competitors. Run ours to find out what to fix and roughly what it is worth; open GTmetrix when you need to go a level deeper into the request timeline. See also our comparison with PageSpeed Insights, which is the closer relative.