OpenText LoadRunner Professional Reviews

We are it using the solution mainly for the REST-based API.

It is quite a good tool. It supports a medical protocol which we tried to explore in other products, but none of them had. It is very difficult to get data tool support in these solutions but LoadRunner does support them, it is a big advantage. Overall, It is pretty simple, easy to use.

My team members predominately used the product to do development but I don't think it needs anything in a way of improvements.

I have been using the solution for over two years.

We didn't see any challenge with this product at all.

The solution can handle a huge amount of workloads, it is quite scalable.

We found the support to be good. Whenever there is an issue with anything, within 24-hours we get an answer. If we want someone from their team to look into an issue, they will log it, analyze it and get back to us.

The installation took around 20 to 30 minutes.

We did the installation and deployment of the product ourselves. It's simple and pretty easy. We were using the LRP, we did not need any technical guidance for anything. We simply installed the configuration, then a few clicks, and we were done.

There is a licensing cost that is expensive. There is also the Enterprise version of the software which allows other features that the Professional does not, such as, license sharing.

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.

I rate OpenText LoadRunner Professional an eight out of ten.

We use this product to test our web application that is used for internet banking.

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. This means that it is very scalable.

I would like to see easier integration with our CICD pipeline.

The product is pretty heavy and should be more lightweight.

I would like to see a browser extension where we can start the development. This would be helpful because right now, this solution is good for UTM integration and performance testing, but if we want to scale then it is difficult.

I have only been using LoadRunner Professional for a short time because I just joined the company, and I used to work with open-source technology.

We have six or seven people using this product.

As we have just begun using it, we have note let had to contact support.

The initial setup is pretty easy. This product is Java-based and you just have to add the independent libraries and dependencies. It is more of a client-server based architecture

This is not a cheap product.

I have primarily used JMeter, which is open-source and free to use.

I have also used Silk Performer, although that was a long way back.

The suitability of one solution over another is very dependant on the use case. When it comes to performance testing, it is very specific to the use case. It depends on your goal and what you want to do.

These days, testing is not a separate activity. It's more about how fast you can quickly deliver and time to market. This is a product that I can recommend, although it depends on the use case. The first question has to be one of budget because LoadRunner is not cheap. Things differ from company to company. At the same time, not all of the free tools can perform all of the functions. It is based on requirements.

If they're a small company, such as a startup e-commerce company, then they might be better off implementing an open-source product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution for client service applications, mostly web-based applications. There are a lot of service conversions needed in terms of Apple to Apple talking or using with a protocol. If you need what they're offering then I think LoadRunner is a good tool. And it's from HP. Primary use cases are creating code-based operations for the latest updates, and API calls if we are in corporate. I'm a QA leader and we are customers of Micro Focus LoadRunner. 

I think correlation is one of the important features. Correlation, parameterization, those kind of features make things easier.

It's a very expensive tool so I think licensing costs could be reduced. I think their monitoring services in real time could be improved and made more user friendly. 

I've been using this solution for nearly 15 years. 

This is a stable product - I've dealt with it over the past 15 years and it's stable.

It's a scalable product in terms of it's running or technology wise. 

Their tech support is pretty good. They try to document things and they are organized. I would say I've had good experience with them. 

This is a heavy-duty tool, so it's not a one-click installation. But I think it's comparatively easier with the documentation they provide.

I would suggest that if you have a site that needs to be used by a lot of people or if it's for enterprise applications where consumption is high, then it's a good tool. Otherwise, if there are fewer users or not a lot of load, then I would say that other tools might be handy. If you require performance-oriented applications, then it's a good tool. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

What we like the most is that it integrates with UC. We use UC for our front-end user experience. It's a more realistic user experience. 

We use the script from the user experience and we use the action times from the UC.

If they were able to, I would say that the scalability could be improved. If the costs were not as expensive to upgrade, then we would scale it more.

The initial setup could be simplified.

I would like to see better licensing costs. 

I have been working with this solution for ten years.

It's a stable solution. In the ten years that we have been using it, I have only had an issue once.  We had an issue with the protocol where it didn't support the job. We contacted support.

It's a scalable solution but I think that the Enterprise version is more scalable and more manageable.

It's fine for us, as we only have a few projects a year. On a larger scale, Enterprise would be better than the Professional edition.

When I had contacted technical support they very helpful.

Previous versions were easy to install but we struggled with the LoadRunner Enterprise to get it to work. It was a bit challenging.

LoadRunner Professional is an expensive product.

I like using LoadRunner and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

All of our installations are on-premises at the moment.  

One of the most valuable features to me is that LoadRunner is familiar. I have worked with it for so long that I know where everything is and I know how it is supposed to work.  

But focusing on actual program features, all I can say is it has good protocol coverage.  

I have not had a really good look at the newest versions of LoadRunner. The problem I have always had with LoadRunner — and even more so with Performance Center — is that it is not very good with agile delivery and it is very difficult to integrate. Software engineers who have been working in agile delivery have been saying this for some time, and have been having success with alternatives.

Also, Performance Center has historically been quite unreliable and difficult. It tends to fail at collation. I think that is because of the Load Runner architecture that Performance Center inherited. Everything waits until the end of a test to collate and it does not always work out well. I know that Micro Focus has done something about that in the new version. But that is the worst thing that happens: with LoadRunner or Performance Center you run a big critical test and you can't get the results.  

I have personally been using LoadRunner and Performance Center for 20 years. I think it's been the backbone of performance testing for 20+ years and must be given credit for helping establish the discipline.

Stability has been an issue. It has really been a big problem for us with Performance Center in particular. Crashing or exiting during collation is not acceptable.   

We have not been totally satisfied with the scalability. We tend to have more issues with Performance Center. The more you try to grow use with it on-prem, the more headaches you have. Often working with LoadRunner and smaller environments is more reliable. We believe the SaaS solution might be better because you have got centralized management.  

Most of my experience is in the early days of Mercury, they were brilliant. They were really good and helped resolve issues. I have not been using them recently.  

Right now we use LoadRunner and Performance Center depending on what we believe are best practices for different situations. We are considering evaluating other options as well, including LoadRunner SaaS.

The two Micro Focus products are interesting to compare. LoadRunner is very easy to set up. Performance Center needs an expert. I can install LoadRunner in minutes by myself. To do the installation properly with Performance Center needs a specialist and takes weeks.  

Plenty of people seem to have installed Performance Center in a couple of days, but when they use it they usually have problems. You really need to do it properly. I do plan to have a look at the newer versions, and maybe those implementations will be smoother.  

Advice that I would give people considering LoadRunner is that I would recommend exploring other tools first or at least in comparison. There are lots of really good open-source or even just cheaper alternatives. Depending on your use case, the other options might be much better. LoadRunner has broad protocol coverage. Sometimes you have got no choice but to go with a solution because of what it can do. But I think the days of LoadRunner being the only solution out there for this kind of testing have gone. There are some very good competitors now and where the competitor can do the job, you will save money.  

On the scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional as about a six. I have not taken a good look at the latest version, but my current experience with the version of the product we use has not been great.  

In our organization, the solution is required for the testing of the performance of applications, response time, and the utilization of resources.

Initially, if you wanted to produce the load from different locations, you needed to have a physical machine there. But with time, the new features ensure that you can (if you want to) have one machine in the Pacific and one in North America. You can request and you can test those machines. You can connect and you can create loads from those locations. It's a very good feature. It's made things easier for us.

The most useful aspect of the solution is that it provides agents in different geographic locations. 

The controller is the best feature, in my opinion.

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.

The technical support aspect of the solution could be improved.

Their current dashboard and their reporting is still following the earlier waterfall models. If they can add some things in the reporting, and update it so it is more modern, that would be great.

I've been using the solution for five years. My organization continues to use it.

This is a really stable tool. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It hasn't crashed on us. We've been satisfied with the level of stability it provides.

The solution is quite scalable. We've run tests with 20,000-30,000 users with no problem. You can add as much as you want, depending on the kind of license you hold. There may be certain licenses that offer limitations. However, with the right license, there sholdn't be issues with regard to scaling.

We don't plan on scaling further ourselves. The plan for the future, right now, is to reduce the usage and include some freeware tools to supplement our needs. 

The technical support is not as great as we expected them to be. The one or two times we have connected with them, they referred us to a model. They often say they will get back to us instead of helping us immediately. It's not very good.

The last issue we had was related to some specific application. The tool was not able to identify the objects on the screen. We had questions, as they used some technology tool provider, and said they were testing at that time, and had mixed the technology on that screen, on the GUI. Loadrunner was not able to recognize it. They said they would come back to us, but we have not seen any answer from them since then. That was around a year back. We've had many questions since then as well.

In the end, we had to solve it internally, but there is no solution from the tool company. Maybe in the next release it will be resolved.

I don't recall looking at other options. We simply decided to go with Loadrunner from the beginning.

The initial setup of the solution was very straightforward, as I recall. It wasn't too complex.

The cloud has allowed for deployments to happen fairly fast. You need one URL and within 15-20 minutes you can have it installed on your local machine.

Due to the fact that the solution has a pretty straightforward initial setup, we didn't need outside assistance. We didn't require the help of integrators or consultants. We handled everything in-house.

In terms of ROI, LoadRunner does everything. Web-based applications or free applications have a poor ROI in comparison. You just don't get the same quality.

I don't have any information about how much it costs to run the solution. I know it is expensive, but I don't handle the accounting, so I'm unsure how much our organization actually pays. I don't believe there are other costs beyond the standard licensing fee.

There are different licence tiers. We have the maximum, so so don't have to deal with any limitations at any time.

There's two types of users on the solution. One is the actual testers. In our organization, we have twenty people using this load. The others are virtual users. The licensing is dependent upon the virtual user and you are charged according to how many virtual users are using the application. Around twenty users are virtual in my organization.

At the time we started with Loadrunner, it was the leader in the market. Now, of course, we have options. However, back then we did not have any competitors to look at or compare to.

We're partners with OpenText.

I'd advise other organizations, if cost is not a problem, to consider LoadRunner, as it is the best product on the market. However, it's not cost-effective for a small company. It's much more suited for enterprises. Smaller companies should look at other options. 

It's a good solution within the market, but it is costly in this region. It is very high. For some it might not make sense when the cost is so high and the support is somewhat lacking.

From an ease of use, installation, deployment, and multi-use tool perspective, I'd rank the solution definitely at an eight or nine out of ten. However, once you include the cost, I'd reduce the ranking to seven out of ten.

I am primarily using LoadRunner to perform tests on HTTP and HTTPS.

This solution provides a one-stop-shop for what we need.

I think that analytics is very good and that the analytics features are very powerful.

You can do live monitoring, which is very useful compared to Apache JMeter.

This is good for a large-scale organization because it supports a lot of protocols.

One of the problems with LoadRunner was always outside sharing. However, now that they are offering a cloud version, this may already work well. 

The infrastructure support can be improved because there are a lot of limitations with the hardware that you can use.

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

I have been using LoadRunner for about ten years.

This solution is very stable. We use it very frequently.

LoadRunner is scalable, although there are some limitations that depend on the application type. That is where you need to scale by adding more load generators. 

We have approximately ten people who are using LoadRunner in the company.

Technical support for LoadRunner is quite good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

In addition to LoadRunner, I was also using Apache JMeter for about three years. JMeter does not support live monitoring unless you use a plugin. However, JMeter has better infrastructure support than LoadRunner.

My company did not switch from JMeter to LoadRunner. They already had already purchased LoadRunner licenses. There are a lot of inherent limitations with JMeter, including analytics capabilities.

The initial setup for the standalone version is very simple and very easy compared to a solution like Apache JMeter. If you have the licenses then you can get started very soon.

It takes perhaps 20 minutes to deploy, depending on the machine configuration. Only one person is required because it has an auto-install package.

For the standalone version of LoadRunner, you don't need help from consultants. However, for something like a performance center then you need a consultant to help.

The licensing fees are based on the number of users. There is also a free community edition, but it depends on what protocol you're using and how many users you want. Essentially, the licensing fees are based on the need.

This is a very mature tool that is always improving and has very good support as well. More or less, they're always trying to revolve their limitations.

In order to use LoadRunner, you need specific skills. In order to use tools of this type then you need performance engineering skills. My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is first to be clear about your use case and what you are trying to do. Develop and follow up on your own performance-testing strategy before implementing LoadRunner. That said, I highly recommend this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use OpenText LoadRunner Professional to run performance test for codes.

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.

The tool needs to work on capture script feature.

The product is very stable.

OpenText LoadRunner Professional's technical support is good. However, I do not contact them often.

Positive

OpenText LoadRunner Professional is easier to use than IBM. It supports a lot of protocols compared to competitors.

The tool's deployment is easy and can be completed in one to two days.

The solution's pricing is expensive.

Our clients are mostly government agencies and enterprises. I rate the solution a nine out of ten.