As every developer knows, what works in the ideal scenario (a.k.a. your production environment) won’t necessarily work in the real world. That’s why you need tools like Retrace to help you quickly track down bugs and performance issues to keep things running smoothly.
Load testing, just one of many valuable testing methods you can use before release to ensure that your application is bug-free and runs seamlessly, is the process of testing whether an application can withstand the load of concurrent users, requests, and data volumes when in use. In other words, load testing is a must for determining if your applications can stand up to real-world use conditions.
There are many load testing tools available today for all kinds of applications and organization. In this article, we’ll look at 50 different load testing tools and highlight the key features of each of them.
Note: The following 50 load testing tools are not ranked or rated in any particular order of importance, but are listed in random order below.
Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java, Open Source application that can be used to test performance on both static and dynamic resources, simulating heavy loads on individual servers, groups of servers, networks, or objects to test strength and analyze performance under different load types. Check out the getting started documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Open Source
WebLOAD from RadView powers the most demanding performance professionals in the world with enterprise-scale load testing.
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Cost:
A desktop tool for load, stress, and scalability testing for both websites and web apps, LoadComplete by SmartBear doesn’t require advanced coding skills – meaning you can focus on the more important tasks. Check out LoadComplete’s documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Plans start at $230 – $1,625 per month, based on a 1-year subscription
NeoLoad is an automated performance testing platform for enterprise organizations continuously testing applications and APIs. The platform provides testers and developers automatic test design and maintenance, realistic simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis and built-in integrations with the entire SDLC toolchain. NeoLoad lets you reuse and share test assets and results from functional testing tools to analytics and metrics from APM tools. It supports the full range of mobile, web and packaged applications, like SAP, to continuously schedule, manage and share test resources and results across the organization to ensure application performance. Check out the overview page here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
Locust is an Open Source load testing tool that enables you to define user behavior using Python to test your system’s performance under millions of simulated, simultaneous users. Full Locust documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
A performance engineering platform for DevOps, BlazeMeter enables you to run and analyze JMeter and other open-source load tests from anywhere.
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Cost:
Load Multiplier is a testing framework to test IT products across domains such as telecommunication, banking, web, proprietary protocols. Additionally given a client library, it can generate millions of such client instances so as to generate real field traffic. It comes with a web based front end, and powerful C/C++ based back end engine.
Key Features:
It provides stable uninterrupted long hour load testing solution for products based on:
1. WebRTC
2. IoT
3. SIP, IMS
4. RTP, RTCP
5. STUN, TURN, ICE
6. HTTP, SOAP, REST
7. JSON, XML
8. G711u, G711a, AMR, OPUS, VP8
9. Any proprietary text / binary protocol
Cost: Contact for a quote
A load and stress testing tool for easily analyzing website performance, WAPT creates tests in minutes for mobile applications, web services or customized ERP systems. The full WAPT documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost:
A complete test automation solution for GUI, performance, load, and API testing, Test Studio from Telerik is a useful tool for testing desktop, web, and mobile applications. The full documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost:
Loader.io offers simple cloud-based load testing for stress testing your web apps and APIs with thousands of concurrent connections. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost:
Get a complete picture of end-to-end system performance to identify and resolve issues before your apps are released with HPE LoadRunner.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
An SaaS-delivered cloud load and performance testing solution, StormRunner Load makes it simple to plan, run, and scale testing for both web and mobile apps.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
CloudTest provides scalable and affordable load testing tools for more efficient, transparent performance testing.
Key Features:
Cost:
A Java load testing framework, The Grinder makes running distributed tests simple using many load injector machines. The Grinder is maintained by Philip Aston, who took over the code (originally developed for the book Professional Java 2 Enterprise Edition with BEA WebLogic Server by Paco Gómez and Peter Zadrozny) and reworked it to create The Grinder 2 and subsequently The Grinder 3. The full documentation can be found here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
An Open Source, multi-protocol, distributed load testing tool, Tsung helps you test the performance and scalability of IP-based client/server applications. Check out the full documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
An Open Source load and performance testing tool for web applications, Gatling helps you improve time-to-market by identifying bottlenecks, errors, and performance issues prior to release. Gatling documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Because automating repetitive tasks just makes sense, Taurus provides an automation-friendly framework for continuous testing. You can read the full documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Httperf is an Open Source HTTP load generator for measuring web server performance that facilitates the construction of both macro- and micro-level benchmarks.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Micro Focus Silk Performer understands that the biggest and most complicated issues happen at the most inconvenient times, so Silk Performer is designed to provide a consistent user experience anywhere, anytime, on any device. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
A tool designed for benchmarking an Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server, ApacheBench gives you an accurate picture of how your current Apache installation performs. The documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Offering powerful tools and flexible options, ZebraTester enables you to easily create and run tests of nearly unlimited scale with incredible visibility into your results.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
Experitest offers several testing tools for mobile apps, including a mobile add-on for HP LoadRunner, which makes it possible to perform mobile load testing by connecting real devices and testing your applications under simulated loads. Read the full documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
With nothing to install and easy configuration, Load Impact offers instant load testing for devops and developers. Read the full documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: $89 – $1,299 per month
Optimize your load and performance testing costs with AgileLoad, which provides distributed and cloud-based testing on-demand and server and database monitoring in a single package.
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Cost:
An easy and cost-effective way to load test both web and mobile apps, LoadStorm helps you find the breaking point of your applications and other weaknesses before your customers do.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
Visual Studio Team Services offers cloud-based load testing to performance test your code under the weight of thousands of users.
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Cost:
A full-featured testing solution for websites, web apps, and web services, Loadster is built for real web applications and can handle cookies, user sessions, custom headers, and more with ease.
Key Features:
Cost: $79 – $2,999
LoadView provides flexible load testing from the cloud for websites, web apps, mobile, and APIs. With a 100% managed cloud, there’s no need to set up your own third-party cloud accounts.
Key Features:
Cost (per load test):
A modern, powerful, and easy-to-use load testing toolkit, Artillery empowers developers to make scalable, performant, and resilient applications that can stand up to high load. The documentation is available here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Ensure that your cloud and server-based applications will continue to work, perform flawlessly, and provide a consistent user experience with eggPlant. Check out eggPlant’s documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
Offering a range of load testing services, Applause helps you ensure that your apps and websites can handle the biggest loads on your most successful days. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
LoadUI provides load testing for REST and SOAP APIs to ensure your APIs never let you down. You can rapidly create API load tests either against a single web service endpoint or an existing functional API test.
Key Features:
Cost: $4,999 – $14,999 per year
JCrawler is an Open Source stress testing tool for web apps with a crawling/exploratory feature enabling you to define a set of starting URLs for JCrawler to begin crawling and generating loads. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
A load testing tool for both web and mobile applications, StresStimulus measures web performance and scalability under heavy traffic loads. The full StresStimulus documentation can be found here.
Key Features:
Cost: $1,040 – $3,950 per month (Perpetual 250 VUs License)
A distributed software testing architecture designed around CORBA, OpenSTA performs scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms. The documentation can be found here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
With SOAtest from Parasoft, you can automate complete end-to-end testing for both business- and security-critical transactions.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
You can’t afford latency in your APIs, and APImetrics aims to solve that challenge by putting real-time API performance data at your fingertips.
Key Features:
Cost: Starts at $10,000 per year
An AWS Lambda powered, distributed load testing tool, GOAD enables you to launch HTTP loads from up to four AWS regions simultaneously. Check out GOAD’s documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
A library injection technique that employs the concept of reflective programming, Reflective DLL injection performs the loading of a library from memory into a host process. Check out the documentation on GitHub.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
A user-friendly tool for web application load testing and performance testing, LoadTracer works like many other load testing tools, recording scripts and playback with hundreds of virtual users.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
A free, Open Source web application tool, Solex was built as a plug-in for Eclipse IDE. The full documentation can be found at SourceForge.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Bees with Machine Guns is a nifty little utility that sends swarms of “bees” to attack (a.k.a. load test) your web applications. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
The first unified test automation platform that completely transforms the software QA process, Appvance eliminates silos and helps you see your app’s performance through your users’ eyes.
Key Features:
Cost: Starts at $99 – $1,200 per month
nGrinder is an enterprise-level performance testing solution based on The Grinder, allowing you to execute script creation, test execution, monitoring, and the result report generator simultaneously. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Test earlier and more often with Rational Performance Tester, which validates web and web server applications for scalability, identifies bottlenecks, and more. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
An Open Source Java-based framework that you can incorporate into your applications for performance testing, J-hawk generates performance reports to help you identify bottlenecks. Check out the documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Selenium isn’t actually a load testing tool itself, although its powerful browser automation features enable various load testing scenarios for low-scale browser loads. Check out Selenium’s documentation here.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Check out our Selenium tutorial!
With Performance Center from HP, you can plan and execute tests across multiple global projects. With software testing tools and consistent processes, you can create a world-class testing center with ease.
Key Features:
Cost: Contact for a quote
A web site coverage, HTTP load generator, HTTP benchmarking, and stress testing tool, Hammerhead is designed to emulate several users from different IP addresses at maximum speeds to push your apps to the limit.
Key Features:
Cost: Free
Load Xen, by Testcollab, enables you to simulate millions of requests to help you more effectively scale your applications. You can create interactions that seem just like real users to your application, randomize requests, run concurrent tests, and more with Load Xen.
Key Features:
Cost:
It is important to test any software’s performance and load handling capabilities before it is released. There are many options available ranging from open source to enterprise-ready tools to perform load testing. We hope this list will help you choose the right load testing tool for your project depending on the kind of software you are building and your budget.
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