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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
11th
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
9th
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 September 2025, in the Performance Testing Tools category, the mindshare of OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) is 13.7%, up from 12.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear LoadNinja is 2.1%, up from 1.3% 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)13.7%
SmartBear LoadNinja2.1%
Other84.2%
Performance 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.
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

"I am impressed with the tool's correlation function."
"The tool's most valuable features are scripting and automation."
"The implementation was very straightforward and not an issue."
"I recommend LoadRunner Professional as it supports many protocols and applications and is very easy to set up and use."
"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."
"My favorite feature in LoadRunner Professional is its ability to group scripts under separate IDs."
"When designing a workload model offers a good range of possibilities for creating goal-oriented scenarios, which helps us understand and meet SLAs."
"The Analysis feature makes it easy to analyze cross-data and we can pin to the focus period."
"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

"Instead of having too many graphs and tabs, use the analysis section to get a more simplified defect analysis."
"LoadRunner experiences high resource utilization. Even though we have machines with higher configurations, I've observed this behavior. Heavy traffic recording results in the tool hanging. So heavy traffic recording makes the tool slow."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, it lacks mobile testing features present in some competitors, like GitMatters, which I find valuable."
"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 pricing could be lower."
"In terms of resource management, you need a lot of high capacity boxes if you need to generate a load of 1,000 or 2,000 users."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a bit on the high side, but it is still affordable."
"The solution's pricing is expensive."
"LoadRunner is more expensive than some competing products."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is a high price, I rate the solution a five."
"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 competing with other products that may cost significantly less or may be available as open-source. Because of that it is relatively expensive."
"LoadRunner Professional is an expensive product."
"LoadRunner Professional's licensing costs are on the higher side, apart from the Community Edition."
"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%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

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 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...
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: September 2025.
867,826 professionals have used our research since 2012.