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OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs OpenText Silk Performer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

OpenText LoadRunner Profess...
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Performance Testing Tools (4th)
OpenText Silk Performer
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Load Testing Tools category, the mindshare of OpenText LoadRunner Professional is 12.7%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Silk Performer is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Load Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

HelenSague - PeerSpot reviewer
A sophisticated tool that supports many languages and works with all kinds of applications
I do not have any big challenges with LoadRunner. I only have some issues with load generators. It is a very common issue, and I hope it will be resolved in the latest release. For example, when we start to run our tests, users get the message that the load generator exceeded 80% of the CPU utilization. Even when the number of users is less, we get these messages. I am trying to resolve it, but it is not going. It is annoying. It is not a failure, but I hope that it will be resolved. IBM WebSphere MQ testing can be a bit challenging. It can handle that, but I hope that they will build more and more capabilities. We do a huge amount of testing for messaging. Just like aviation, the railway industry is based on messaging. There is messaging to build trains and messaging to create some bills. There are many train movements. Everything involves messaging. I wish that it will be developed more for IBM WebSphere testing. Monitoring is okay, but for testing, I currently have to create Java users. I have to load a lot of libraries from IBM WebSphere and so on.
SR
Scripting and basic test executions are good features; configuring the workload for tests is easy
In terms of areas of improvement, I would say the Silk Performance Explorer tool, which is used for monitoring and analysis, can be improved because that's where we spend most of our time when we're analyzing the test data. Any enhancements that can be provided in the monitoring sphere would be useful. When you have a large amount of data the tool struggles with it and will sometimes crash, or there may be issues with too many metrics being collected when running a test. The interface for the scripting could be more feature-rich. Integration with tools like Prometheus or Grafana where we can visualize the data would be great. As things stand, we have to use one monitoring tool to visualize data and another for visualizing the test metrics. Integration would enable us to see the metrics from Silk and correlate that with the metrics from other servers or other processes we're monitoring. It would save having to look at Silk data and server metrics separately. It's the way things are going with newer tools. I think the solution is being phased out by Micro Focus and their emphasis is focused more on LoadRunner. We haven't seen much development in the last few years.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup and installation of the software were very easy and straightforward."
"I would definitely recommend OpenText LoadRunner Professional to other users."
"Very useful for finding out how the system responds to load, stress, and normal situations, as well as benchmarking with other industry competitors. It also improved our response time, memory delegation, and CPU delegation. In addition, we used LoadRunner to optimize our database and website."
"I think that analytics is very good and that the analytics features are very powerful."
"It provides clients with an understanding of application and system performance."
"I appreciate its ability to handle various internal calls and its user-friendly interface."
"One of the most valuable features of LoadRunner Professional is the wide range of protocols it supports, especially the web user v user types."
"I would rate Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional's stability at eight out of ten."
"A good monitoring tool, simple to script and easy to configure."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to work on capture script feature."
"I guess scalability becomes a problem when you use things like TruClients."
"Instead of having too many graphs and tabs, use the analysis section to get a more simplified defect analysis."
"The product is pretty heavy and should be more lightweight."
"More guidance on the use of the Tru Client protocol which is used for Web interfaces."
"The solution uses a lot of memory and then it dies. It's difficult to work with the solution sometimes when you run a scenario it dies. They need to make the solution lighter somehow."
"The pricing could be lower."
"The solution is very costly. The cost is very high, especially considering a lot of other resources are available now and they are less expensive. For a small organization, it is very difficult to sustain the costs involved in having the solution or the related fees"
"If you have a large amount of data, the solution can struggle."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"LoadRunner is more expensive than some competing products."
"The fee for LoadRunner Professional is very high - about US$500 per user."
"This is not a cheap product."
"The pricing model, especially when involving partners, could use some improvement."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis and is relatively expensive."
"There is an annual license required to use Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional. There are not any additional costs other than the licensing fees to use it."
"It is competing with other products that may cost significantly less or may be available as open-source. Because of that it is relatively expensive."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."
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Comparison Review

it_user104961 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 13, 2014
LoadRunner vs NeoLoad
The six phases of an IT project Enthusiasm Disillusionment Panic Search for the guilty Punishment of the innocent (the performance tester) Praise and rewards for the incompetent non-participants This article has been put together as part of an evaluation of the performance test tools NeoLoad and…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
6%
Sports Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?
When designing a workload model offers a good range of possibilities for creating goal-oriented scenarios, which helps us understand and meet SLAs.
What needs improvement with Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?
I would like to improve OpenText LoadRunner Professional based on what we discussed in our last discussion, as those points remain similar and applicable. For future updates, I would like to see th...
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Also Known As

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional, Micro Focus LoadRunner, HPE LoadRunner, LoadRunner
Micro Focus Silk Performer, Silk Performer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, GOME, Australian Red Cross Blood Service, RMIT University, Virgin Media
University of Colorado, Medidata, Monash University
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Tricentis, Perforce and others in Load Testing Tools. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.