OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs ReadyAPI comparison

OpenText and SmartBear are both solutions in the Performance Testing Tools category. OpenText is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5, while SmartBear is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.5. OpenText holds a 13.5% mindshare in PTT, compared to SmartBear’s 2.8% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of OpenText users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of SmartBear users who would recommend it.

OpenText LoadRunner Profess...

Read 80 OpenText LoadRunner Professional reviews

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94% willing to recommend

ReadyAPI

Read 36 ReadyAPI reviews

909 Views
470 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

OpenText LoadRunner Profess...

ReadyAPI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 5, 2025

OpenText LoadRunner Professional and ReadyAPI are leading products in the software testing space, particularly in performance and API testing respectively. LoadRunner maintains an upper hand with its versatility in protocol support and sophisticated analysis tools, while ReadyAPI stands out for its accessibility and integration capabilities.

Features: OpenText LoadRunner Professional provides powerful scripting tools and extensive protocol support, allowing users to test almost any application. It integrates external measurements and offers detailed results analysis to identify performance issues. The ability to simulate multiple users concurrently is a key advantage. ReadyAPI is user-friendly and supports various APIs, providing a platform for functional, load, and security testing. It integrates seamlessly with CI/CD tools.

Room for Improvement: OpenText LoadRunner Professional is often criticized for its complexity, especially regarding ease of use and integration with external systems. The learning curve is steep, requiring skilled resources and its licensing cost is high. ReadyAPI, while praised for its usability, can be sluggish and less intuitive in handling mobile testing and NoSQL databases. The licensing structure can also present challenges.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both OpenText LoadRunner Professional and ReadyAPI offer flexible deployment options, including on-premises and cloud. LoadRunner supports private cloud deployment as well. Customer service for LoadRunner is deemed good, with minor notes on support delays. ReadyAPI users value the community and forums but face challenges due to licensing quirks.

Pricing and ROI: OpenText LoadRunner Professional's higher licensing costs and complex pricing model can deter smaller companies. Despite the high initial cost, it provides positive ROI through robust performance testing. ReadyAPI offers more flexible pricing with functionality-based options, appealing to enterprises looking for cost-effective API testing solutions. It shows strong ROI by reducing testing times and improving workflow integration.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. ReadyAPI Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. ReadyAPI

April 2025

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Helped 849,686 peers since 2012

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 Performance Testing Tools

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Load Testing Tools (4th)

ReadyAPI

Ranking in Performance Testing Tools

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Functional Testing Tools (17th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Performance Testing Tools category, the mindshare of OpenText LoadRunner Professional is 13.5%, down from 13.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ReadyAPI is 2.8%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Performance Testing Tools

Featured Reviews

HelenSague

Senior Performance Testing Specialist at Canadian Pacific Railway

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.

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SandeepSingh9

Sr. QA Engineer at Arizona Department of Education

Allows you to parameterize in one place for the changes to reflect everywhere and lets you customize the environment, but its load testing feature needs improvement, and costs need to be cheaper

One of the features of ReadyAPI that's worth mentioning is that it allows you to parameterize. I'm working with more than two hundred resources, so I don't have to go and make a small change at each point every time. I have the option to just parameterize in one place for the changes to reflect everywhere. Another valuable feature of ReadyAPI is that it provides a customized environment. In my company, you work in different environments, such as QA, UAT, and LT, so the URLs for every environment are different. In ReadyAPI, you can customize your environment, set it up, then start working on it. Another feature worth mentioning that's offered in ReadyAPI is automating your test value as the tool allows Groovy scripting. In your test case, you can use a Groovy script that says that in a particular test case, you have ten resources, but you just want to exhibit five and that you don't want to exhibit the remaining five. You can write a small Groovy script that lets you execute just five resources out of the ten resources. I also like that ReadyAPI allows you to read the data from CFC and Excel. It also allows you to create or customize your data, but that only works at a certain point because every application has its specific data. ReadyAPI cannot generate every data, but when I'm posting and I want to generate a random name, such as a first name, I can do it in ReadyAPI. The tool also has many different features which I find valuable, including Git integration.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"When designing a workload model offers a good range of possibilities for creating goal-oriented scenarios, which helps us understand and meet SLAs."

"It is an advanced tool with multiple options available for the performance system."

"It provides clients with an understanding of application and system performance."

"The stability of Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is very high. It is the leading tool for stability."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to create performance test cases quickly and then execute them. It provides a lot of powerful features to do that very efficiently and effectively."

"The ability to do multithreading. That's available in any performance testing tool, but the number of protocols that this particular tool supports has been very good."

"The Analysis feature makes it easy to analyze cross-data and we can pin to the focus period."

"I like LoadRunner's ability to use multiple protocols. That's one of the greatest features along with the ability to test service calls between the app and server."

More OpenText LoadRunner Professional pros

"The most valuable features of ReadyAPI are its robust functionality and collaboration capabilities."

"For anyone who does not have experience with automation, ReadyAPI provides a sense of comfort, especially for testers who find it hard to go directly into coding."

"The most valuable features are the integration with Jira and the test management tools."

"It's easy to implement."

"The most valuable features of ReadyAPI are the drag-and-drop options and the integration with versioning tool solutions, such as Git."

"The most valuable features of ReadyAPI are the ready-to-use assertions and filters which can perform the validation. If we want to filter out any value, the filters are available. Apart from that database integration, if you want to go ahead and perform validation in the database layer it is possible with the ready-to-use feature available. The execution and reporting are rich features."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"It's easy to learn how to use it."

Cons

"The monitoring technology in LoadRunner could be improved. It depends on another tool called SiteScope, but they only took a part of the features of SiteScope. They need to improve on that."

"I would like to have better support for adding more users per load generator."

"I also use the TrueClient feature for browser-based testing. I found the TrueClient feature to be a bit difficult to use and not very user-friendly for automating scripts."

"The only scenario we see a complexity is when we have single-page applications where JavaScript is talking to the server and coming back. That's the only scenario where we find some difficulties."

"The tool needs to work on capture script feature."

"Improvement wise, the pipeline should be enabled. It should be embedded as part of the tool itself rather than going with third-party tools. Monitoring should be more effective as well."

"We are going to continue to use the product in the future, I recommend this product. However, those who are looking for only REST-based on the API, I would recommend some other tool because of the cost. There are others available on the market."

"The technical support of Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional could improve. I had an issue with the licensing and their response time is slow. They can improve on this in the future."

More OpenText LoadRunner Professional cons

"The solution is made up of multiple tools, and the one additional feature we'd like to have is load testing."

"The Property Transfer capability could be more user friendly because it is a bit difficult to understand."

"I don't like how they don't have a clear way to manage tests between multiple projects."

"The reporting is not very robust and needs to be improved."

"Sometimes, if I changed something in ReadyAPI, it would not quickly pick up the change. It used to give me the same error repeatedly, and when I closed the application completely and restarted it, it would pick up that change."

"The UI should be flexible. Currently, the UI isn't."

"What needs improvement in ReadyAPI is its load testing feature because there was a hiccup when my team performed some load testing on the tool. My team had meetings with the ReadyAPI team and tried to get that issue fixed, but it still hasn't improved. This is a shortcoming of the tool, especially when you compare it with HP LoadRunner."

"Performance and memory management both need to be improved because other solutions use less memory for the same amount of data."

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."

"The price is a bit on the high side, but it is still affordable."

"It is reasonable. We pay the cost, but we have everything. We have a big set of licenses for SAP and other applications. We have all kinds of licenses."

"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."

"The licensing of Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional could improve. If it can be easier and the concurrent run can be included with the current total number of users, it would be helpful."

"I don't know the licensing cost, but I think that you would get a discount for normal usage. I think there are different yearly options for different types of usage. It is not only how many users, but also whether it is shareable or not and other criteria involved in each feature. There are additional fees for the users and hardware linked to the processing."

"It is a high-cost investment, particularly for companies with small budgets or limited testing needs."

More OpenText LoadRunner Professional pricing and cost advice

"We use fixed licenses, and the last time I checked, I want to say it's around $680 per seat per year."

"The price was around $6,000 for one license, but I don't remember exactly. It is definitely expensive. Our organization was planning on having multiple licenses for this year."

"The thing with ReadyAPI is that you have to buy different licenses for different purposes."

"It is expensive. Each user needs to be licensed, and there are different licenses within the product. It starts with 750 euros for a single user per year, but for the full product features, you need to pay a lot more. There are three versions. This cost is for functional testing, and then there is a cost for load testing and virtual services. If you want to use these areas with the functional test license, you are limited. You hit some limits in these functions. If you have all three licenses, then you have full functionality for the API."

"If I remember correctly, ReadyAPI costs between $5,000 to $7,000 for five thousand virtual users running it at a given point in time. Other tools, for example, Apache JMeter, can run millions of users at a given time. ReadyAPI is a tool that requires you to pay more money if you want more users to run it for performance testing. For functional testing, each ReadyAPI license costs $1,000, and you do get basic testing, and it's inclusive of one hundred users. In my company, if there's a need for more than one hundred users, my team uses Apache JMeter because it's futile to end up paying $5,000 or $6,000 annually just for performance testing, which can be done in Apache JMeter as well. Given the circumstances, my team does performance testing only towards the end of the fiscal year when the regulatory testing of applications takes place. If I have to run ReadyAPI just for two days or just for ten or fifteen odd days, then it's not worth paying $5,000 for the license with the small number of users provided by ReadyAPI."

"ReadyAPI is moderately priced, with added costs for more plugins."

"The solution is dynamically priced so you only pay for what you use."

"It costs approximately $200 000 Taiwan Dollars for three years."

Comparison Review

it_user104961

Penetration and Neoload Tester at a university with 501-1,000 employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

15%

Insurance Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?

The pricing should be reduced and made more competitive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?

Technical support needs to be faster, and the pricing should be more competitive. The virtual table server feature should be reintroduced. Some AI capabilities should be added. There should be an '...

See all answers

What do you like most about ReadyAPI?

The performance testing capabilities are very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ReadyAPI?

Currently, we don't extensively use the performance testing due to license costs. License prices can be a factor in considering which technologies to adopt.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ReadyAPI?

In native teams and cloud environments, there is room for improvement. I'm considering the use of AWS and its Lambda functionalities prepared by the vendor. These are more so points from my wishlis...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tricentis NeoLoad vs OpenText LoadRunner Professional

Compared 31% of the time

OpenText LoadRunner Cloud vs OpenText LoadRunner Professional

Compared 14% of the time

Apache JMeter vs OpenText LoadRunner Professional

Compared 12% of the time

OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Enterprise) vs OpenText LoadRunner Professional

Compared 7% of the time

Tricentis Tosca vs OpenText LoadRunner Professional

Compared 5% of the time

More OpenText LoadRunner Professional Competitors

Apache JMeter vs ReadyAPI

Compared 40% of the time

Tricentis Tosca vs ReadyAPI

Compared 17% of the time

Parasoft SOAtest vs ReadyAPI

Compared 12% of the time

Katalon Studio vs ReadyAPI

Compared 12% of the time

ReadyAPI Test vs ReadyAPI

Compared 7% of the time

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenText LoadRunner Professional

April 2025

Download OpenText LoadRunner Professional product report

Buyer's Guide

ReadyAPI

April 2025

Download ReadyAPI product report

Also Known As

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional, Micro Focus LoadRunner, HPE LoadRunner, LoadRunner

Ready API

Overview

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

OpenText

ReadyAPI is an all-in-one automated testing platform that allows teams to create, manage, and execute automated functional, security, and performance tests in one centralized interface.

ReadyAPI Features

Some of ReadyAPI’s key features include:

Continuous integration
Comprehensive dashboard
API discovery
Central, standardized reporting function
Plugin architecture
ReadyAPI Projects
Multiple options for scripting to create functional, load, or security tests

ReadyAPI Benefits

Some of the benefits of using ReadyAPI include:

Easy and flexible test creation and execution: ReadyAPI has visual editors and wizards that make testing easy, saving time and simplifying onboarding.
Test APIs continuously: With ReadyAPI you can run consistent tests on local environments, Docker containers, or other distributed staging environments.
Team friendly: ReadyAPI enables software teams with the ability to easily share testing projects and artifacts, share licenses between team members, and report issues directly from the testing IDE.
Powerful, data-driven testing capabilities: With ReadyAPI, you can save time by checking for numerous real world conditions.
Supports multiple specifications, schemas, and protocols: ReadyAPI includes legacy SOAP services, microservices powered by Apache Kafka, and mainstream REST services, as well as IoT use cases leveraging MQTT. It allows you to test and virtualize the most popular API protocols and also to import APIs from specifications and schemas instantly.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity users.

PeerSpot user Vallalarasu P., Test Architect at a tech services company, states, “ReadyAPI is one of the best tools for API testing because they have made a single platform for functional testing, load testing security, and also service actualization. We also have virtual work that can be an add-in within ReadyAPI. For integration for CACD, they have something called TestEngine, which can also be an add-on for ReadyAPI. We use Python request library and things like that but if you're a bigger organization with hundreds of APIs, then ReadyAPI is a one-stop solution for complete API testing. If you consider TestComplete and other products for an equivalent outcome, you might get something nearly comparable, butReadyAPI is the outstanding product.”

An IT Manager at an insurance company says the solution has “Fast automation, less coding, and is pretty lightweight. When you are working in sprints, you need to have continuous feedback. ReadyAPI definitely helps in automating very fast and rapidly. We have less coding, and we can more easily define our assertions. We don't use it for full-blown performance testing, but normally if you are doing your functional testing, it gives you the request and response time. Anybody who is doing functional testing can see what the request and response times are and raise a flag based upon their business affiliates, that is, whether it is meeting their affiliates. You can identify this during functional testing."

Balamurugan A., Manager at a financial services firm, comments, “We like the user interface. The most valuable features are the integration with Jira and the test management tools.

They have interfaces with our performance tools, so we were able to leverage all of these integrations and plugins. It is very good from an integrative solution standpoint.”

SmartBear

Sample Customers

JetBlue, GOME, Australian Red Cross Blood Service, RMIT University, Virgin Media

Healthcare Data Solutions (HDS)

Buyer's Guide

OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. ReadyAPI

April 2025

Free Report: OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. ReadyAPI

Find out what your peers are saying about OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. ReadyAPI and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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