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OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) vs SmartBear LoadNinja comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 21, 2025

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 Professional Perfo...
Ranking in Performance Testing Tools
4th
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SmartBear LoadNinja
Ranking in Performance Testing Tools
13th
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
11th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Performance Testing Tools category, the mindshare of OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) is 13.1%, up from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear LoadNinja is 2.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Performance Testing Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional)13.1%
SmartBear LoadNinja2.2%
Other84.7%
Performance Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Kulveer Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports AI-enabled load testing and aids in preventing unexpected outages by ensuring infrastructure sizing aligns with the anticipated load
The challenge lies in the time-consuming manual coding and testing. It takes a while to understand it, repeat it with the managers or a business analyst, and then share the reports with stakeholders, and the whole process takes time. So it would be beneficial for us if there is some kind of a dashboard where you can have different rules. A dashboard with different rules would be beneficial for quick approvals and deployment, reducing the need for extensive meetings and email communication. It could be improved in some areas to support the latest web technologies. For example, LoadRunner could be improved to better support single-page applications (SPAs). Another way to improve LoadRunner would be to add better support for testing SPAs. Now, most people are going for WAV 2.0. Most of the applications are single-page applications where the browser is not refreshing.
Kapil Tarka - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use with good documentation and helpful support
It's a new tool when I compare it with LoadViewer and HP LoadRunner. It needs time to mature. For example, it needs to improve concurrency. When you run a test suite, your scripts will generate some test data. If we are running a banking application and then we are running a full end-to-end suite, there are many actions that need testing. There's a lot of data getting generated. There should be a variable that we can store for later in our later test cases. We need data management and dynamic data generation to be able to capture the data which is generated.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature depends on what we're doing at the time. In the past, the greatest feature was the ability to record and play back to produce a script. Another great feature is that we can monitor the system. They also support many protocols to perform load testing."
"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."
"I appreciate its ability to handle various internal calls and its user-friendly interface."
"LoadRunner Professional allowed us to load test potential new payroll solutions that would be implemented throughout the entire organization so that we knew which was best suited to performing well under pressure."
"The solution helps my clients save time. It is easier to capture reports and improves product quality. The product helps to identify customer defects during performance tests and reduces workloads. The product has improved my client's user interaction. It has reduced peak load times."
"Paramterization and correlation are important features."
"It has features for recording. The best feature with Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional is that there is very little bottleneck or overhead issues. With LoadRunner, you can spawn 2000 contributions for one machine."
"One of the most valuable features of LoadRunner Professional is the wide range of protocols it supports, especially the web user v user types."
"It's a very simple tool for performance testing."
"SmartBear LoadNinja is easy to use and implement."
"We are happy with the technical support."
 

Cons

"I would like the solution to include monitoring capacity."
"The pricing could be lower."
"Instead of having too many graphs and tabs, use the analysis section to get a more simplified defect analysis."
"The price of this solution should be cheaper."
"Sometimes, we aren't able to see an accurate page view while replying and executing the script. When you are navigating the application side by side, it needs to be displayed on a random viewer. Sometimes we will get a few applications, and we won't get others."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"On a smaller scale, there will be no budget issues, but as we expand to a larger user base, I believe we will face some pricing challenges."
"It needs time to mature."
"As we ran the test, we couldn't see the real-time results of how the solution behaved for 200 to 400 virtual users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a bit on the high side, but it is still affordable."
"The licensing fees are based on the number of users."
"There is a licensing cost that is expensive."
"The pricing model and the software licensing model could be better."
"OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise's pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"The fee for LoadRunner Professional is very high - about US$500 per user."
"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."
"Certainly, the cost could be reduced."
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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
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Consumer Goods Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise66
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 have mentioned many advantages about this product, but to discuss disadvantages or areas that could be improved, I would need to consult with my engineers who are working on it. So far I have not...
What do you like most about SmartBear LoadComplete?
SmartBear LoadNinja is easy to use and implement.
What needs improvement with SmartBear LoadComplete?
SmartBear LoadNinja presented issues around some use cases that we wanted to do. We were using the solution to simulate using a browser and to give some browser access to our use case for multiple ...
What advice do you have for others considering SmartBear LoadComplete?
For API, we were previously using JMeter, which is an open-source solution. Overall, I rate SmartBear LoadNinja a seven out of ten.
 

Also Known As

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional, Micro Focus LoadRunner, HPE LoadRunner, LoadRunner
SmartBear LoadComplete
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, GOME, Australian Red Cross Blood Service, RMIT University, Virgin Media
Falafel Software
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) vs. SmartBear LoadNinja and other solutions. Updated: November 2025.
873,085 professionals have used our research since 2012.