Best Load Testing Tools

Apache JMeter is an open-source Java application that tests load and functional behavior and performance in applications. Created initially to test web applications, it has expanded its functionality to test other functions. For instance, you can test a server to see how efficiently it works and how many user requests can be handled simultaneously. You can use JMeter to test functional performance and regression tests on different technologies. This Java desktop application has an easy-to-use graphical interface which uses the Swing graphical API. You can run JMeter on any environment that accepts a Java virtual machine, such as Windows, Linux, and Mac. What protocols does JMeter support? Web - HTTP, HTTPS Web services - SOAP/XML-RPC Email service - POP3, IMAP, SMTP FTP service Database via JDBC drivers LDAP Native commands or shell scripts TCP Java objects How does JMeter work? JMeter sends requests to a target server by simulating a group of user requests. Then it collects and calculates statistics on the performance of the target. This target can be a server or an application. You can test the performance of static resources, such as JavaScript or HTML, and dynamic resources, such as JSP, Servlets, and AJAX. It is also helpful to determine how many concurrent users your website can handle. There are two main tests you can carry out with JMeter: load test and stress test. The load test models expected usage of a server by simulating multiple users accessing the web server simultaneously. The stress testing aims to find the maximum load capacity of the server or application. Apache JMeter Key Features JMeter enables fast test plan recording, building, and debugging via a featured test IDE (integrated development environment). Command-line mode allows carrying out load tests from any OS compatible with Java. JMeter can extract data from most popular response formats, such as HTML, JSON, XML. JMeter is entirely portable. A multithreading framework allows you to simultaneously test multiple samplings and separate thread groups. Thanks to the caching feature, you can conduct offline analysis or replay test results. Apache JMeter Benefits As open-source software, it is freely available and continuously improved. The setup is user-friendly, and no installation is needed. The GUI (graphic user interface) is intuitive and easy to use. You can write your own tests and use the visualization plugins to extend the testing. It is a platform-agnostic tool. For example, JMeter can work with Linux by clicking on the JMeter shell script. On Windows, you can call up JMeter by starting the jmeter.bat file. Since the test plans are stored in XML format, you can generate a test plan using any text editor. You can simulate a heavy load on a server, a group of servers, a network, or an object. Use JMeter to test an application or server's strength and performance under different load types. The JMeter extensible core has numerous benefits: Unlimited testing capabilities via pluggable samplers. You can choose multiple load statistics with pluggable timers. Visualization plugins and data analysis enable customization. Continuous integration via third-party open-source libraries (Maven, Gradle, and Jenkins). Reviews from Real UsersStephen B., I.T. Architect, Analyst, and Developer at an educational organization, says, "The scripting ability is most valuable. It is easy to use. There is a UI, and you can go in there and figure those things out. After you've got a good set of tests, you basically have a scripted document that you can grab and execute in a pipeline. It is pretty quick to set up, and you can scale it and version control it.""I like the fact that JMeter integrates well with other tools," adds the Founder and Principal Consultant at a tech services company.A Quality Engineering Delivery Leader at a financial services firm says, “The performance of the solution is excellent. They have designed the product so that it is very easy to configure. You can basically do anything you like with the product. It's not very restrictive. We like the fact that the technology is open-source.”

OpenText LoadRunner Professional is a performance testing tool used for various software applications, including web-related use cases, API testing, and enterprise performance modeling. Its valuable features include quick test case creation and execution, graph monitoring, multiple protocols, scripting and executing tests, scalability, easy setup, auto-correlation, analysis and reporting capabilities, stability, reliability, and compatibility with various programming languages.  LoadRunner has helped organizations load test potential new payroll solutions and choose the best option, record network traffic of mobile applications, and handle different protocols. It is the ultimate tool for performance testing. OpenText LoadRunner Professional Will Enable You To: Drive quality across your enterprise. Alleviate the challenges of managing many application types, testing tools, licenses, repositories, and systems while working toward unified results. With OpenText LoadRunner Professional You Can: Increase organizational efficiency through standardization of tools and resources. Balance your priorities and improve the results delivered by your testing team. Increase testing productivity. Improve collaboration across application teams. Gain the ability to outsource some or all the tactical work of load testing. OpenText LoadRunner Professional Features: Intuitive and Easy to Use: OpenText LoadRunner Professional is intuitive, versatile, and easy to use, which makes it easy for testers to quickly learn the basics and apply them to their testing tasks, while engineers who are more experienced can utilize all the features for the most complex of scenarios. Comprehensive Enterprise Coverage: OpenText LoadRunner Professional provides support for multiple protocols such as HTML, WebSocket, AJAX, RDP, Database, Remote Terminal Emulators, Citrix, Java, .NET, Oracle and SAP. Scripting Technologies: Reduce scripting time by 50% or more via OpenText LoadRunner Professional’s TruClient protocol, and automatic correlation, and correlate both front end (user experience) and back end (load) issues. Extensive and Flexible Test Scenarios: The LoadRunner solution provides several valuable features that let you validate, enhance, and modify your tests. It gives you the ability to integrate external measurements to assess the impact on every application component, extend tests with success-failure checks, and emulate peak loads. You can also apply load on the go and change parameters for better flexibility in order to yield the most representative testing possible. Realistic Network Conditions: Network virtualization capabilities help accurately simulate realistic conditions for an accurate analysis of both throughput and user response time. Realistic network conditions are predicted using location-aware analytics, transaction analysis and optimization. Accurate Workloads with Low Overhead: OpenText LoadRunner Professional allows you to run high-scale tests with minimal hardware so that you can apply accurate workloads to any application. Ongoing Testing Support: The OpenText LoadRunner Professional solution provides continuous testing support via built-in integrations across IDE, CI/CD, open source test automation, monitoring, and source code management tools. OpenText LoadRunner Professional Benefits: Quickly deliver enterprise engineering capabilities and facilitate sharing of assets and collaboration. Reduce complexity and increase utilization of infrastructure and human resources. Get the big picture with cross-project reporting and individual project drill downs. Increase collaboration and consistency with unified storage and access to all relevant assets. Reduce costs with centralized management and built-in support of cloud-based load generation. Analyze end-to-end performance, including topology, infrastructure-level, and advanced insights. Incorporate application monitoring and user sentiment data to take a centralized approach to data collection and connect the dots. Using powerful analytics and insights, gain visibility into the test status across the entire enterprise and performance trending information across multiple tests. Reviews from Real Users:"The most useful aspect of the solution is that it provides agents in different geographic locations.” - Head, Testing Centre of Excellence at NIIT Technologies Limited "The most important feature for us is that it supports a lot of protocols because we support all of them, including HTTP, FTP, mainframe, and others.” - Test Automation, DevOps & Performance Engineering at a financial services firm "The solution can handle a huge amount of workloads, it's quite scalable.” - Regional Head Customer Experience at a financial services firm "The reporting mechanism is a valuable feature that generates good reports.” - Senior Architect at a computer software company

Tricentis NeoLoad is a performance testing tool that provides developers and testers with automatic test design, test maintenance, realistic simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis, and built-in integrations with the entire SDLC toolchain. With NeoLoad’s plugins, teams can reuse and share test assets and results from functional testing tools, analytics, metrics, and APM tools in order to catch performance issues early. With NeoLoad’s full tech stack support, users can test the range of mobile, web, and desktop apps. Tricentis NeoLoad Features Tricentis NeoLoad has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include: Supports API technologies Support for SOAP/REST. Assisted design with Swagger/Open API import and highly efficient extractors for quick test design and fewer errors in scripting. Ability to test as code or GUI-based productivity. Automated testing of API performanceCI/CD automated API testing, dynamic load generation infrastructure, and auto pass/fail based on SLAs. Real-time test results for fast dev feedback loop if bottleneck is found. Non-regression API performance trends. API-based applications Ability to test stand-alone APIs or APIs within end-to-end tests. Same platform, same skills. Dev, PO, QA, Ops share a common view of API performance. Confidence in API and application speed and reliability. Design tests faster and update automaticallyAssisted design using wizards and automatic parameter handling. Reuse functional scripts and/or convert LoadRunner scripts to NeoLoad performance tests. Update system-level scripts quicker with automatic user path updates. Easy to reuse and maintain. Realistic user simulation Simulate any business case. Scale load tests with up to millions of virtual users. Bottleneck identification Real-time test analysis. Pass/fail based on SLA. Root cause analysis. Tricentis NeoLoad Benefits There are many benefits to implementing Tricentis NeoLoad. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include: Automate API testing within CI pipelines: Design, maintain, and run performance tests. Analyze results within continuous integration pipelines. Accelerate end-to-end app testing: Create test scripts fast for complex applications using a graphical user interface without the complexity of scripting new and updated tests. Find performance bottlenecks fast: Compare SLAs to server-level statistics to measure how an application is performing. See overall analysis of behavior or an analysis of the data flow to a particular user path. Manage across the enterprise: Collaborate across QA, operations, dev, and business teams to define SLAs and review results. Share test results and manage test infrastructure. Schedule and share resources across teams and apps. Reviews from Real Users Tricentis NeoLoad stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its price, its user-friendly UX, its API support, and its scalability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews: Patrik B., Technical Lead at a tech services company, writes, “The licensing cost is very less for NeoLoad. It is user-friendly and easy to understand because they have created so many useful functionalities. When I started working with this tool, we just had to do the initial assessment about whether this tool will be able to support our daily work or not. I could easily understand it.” A Global Delivery Head at a consultancy firm notes, “The API support is much better with this solution, compared with the competition. Pricing for it is also more affordable than its competitor. We have used Tricentis NeoLoad and we find it scalable.”

BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source-based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing BlazeMeter community has more than 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with its research and development in Tel Aviv.

Your globally distributed performance testing teams have the responsibility of driving quality acrossyour enterprise while testing a broad range of application types, managing costs and deploying applications that meet the performance requirements of your business. OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise delivers a collaborative testing platform that reduces complexity, centralizes resources and leverages shared assets and licenses to increase consistency across your enterprise.

Do your performance and load testing in the cloud. OpenText LoadRunner Cloud makes it easy to plan, run, and scale performance tests without the need to deploy and manage infrastructure.

Application Testing Suite is a comprehensive, integrated testing solution that ensures the quality, scalability, and availability of your Web applications, Web Services, packaged Oracle Applications and Oracle databases.

ReadyAPI Performance is an open-source load and quality assurance testing solution whose design allows organizations of all sizes to completely control their load testing process. It gives administrators the ability to customize their testing parameters and tests to best meet their needs. They can also quickly run the tests that they need to run in order to guarantee the peak performance of their application and various network components.  ReadyAPI Performance Benefits Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying ReadyAPI Performance include: Run ReadyAPI Performance on the operating system of your choice. It is a system agnostic solution and can be deployed on any of the major operating systems that are currently on the market.  Track events in real time. ReadyAPI Performance enables users to monitor every part of their application and network in real time. This makes it possible for administrators to spot potential issues and resolve them before they can harm their application’s performance.  Test flexibility. Administrators can customize the tests that they run to best fit their particular needs. Any test that an organization needs can be designed and run by this solution without the need for integration with additional solutions.  ReadyAPI Performance FeaturesSome of the many useful features ReadyAPI Performance has to offer include: Test customization tools. Users have access to a number of tools that enable them to set the parameters of and design the tests that they run to meet their application requirements. These tools make it possible for them to tweak the tests while they are running, should that prove necessary. Administrators can drag and drop the components that they want to use to create the tests. Test report generator. ReadyAPI Performance comes with a report generator that provides users with easy to understand test insights. After the tests end, this feature produces a report that shows not only the results of the test, but also an analysis that enables administrators to understand the implications of their test results.  Robust load testing capabilities.  ReadyAPI Performance’s load testing tools can handle high volumes of load testing.  Reviews from Real Users ReadyAPI Performance is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the wealth of features that it makes available to users and the ease with which organizations can deploy it for use.  Kumar G., a software engineer at Birlasoft India Ltd., writes, “It provides many features. It facilitates load testing, operational volume testing, spike testing for the APIs, and the API is very fast It stores good reports, as in, improved reports if compared with SoapUI. It also has in-built security. You just need to switch and check the security testing.” He also writes, “The initial setup is not very complex. For testers, they have to create their test cases and scenarios within ReadyAPI, and there they simply go for the load testing.”