Performance testing is an important part of mobile application development. Fortunately, there are some free tools to help you perform the needed tests.
Testing mobile applications can be a daunting and often frustrating effort. It is for this reason that we have compiled a list of the top performance testing tools for mobile apps.
Akamai CloudTest
CloudTest is an integrated load testing tool which provides website verification and mobile app performance through user-based testing. It’s a useful performance testing solution for businesses of all sizes that helps with global load assessment, simulation of large events, precision control, visual test creation, customizable dashboards, & more.
Highlighted Features
- Shift-left testing: Plug into continuous integration (CI) tools for automated “shift-left” testing
- Elastic, Globally Distributed Environment: Accurately test your infrastructure with geographically dispersed loads. Its Global Test Cloud generates realistic production volume from locations that represent your actual user base.
- Visual Test Creation: Object-based scripting allows you to insert conditionals and loops; nest actions; set parameters, variables, and validations; and reuse and combine tests — all without code.
- Visual Playback Editor: Drag and drop test cases into tracks to be executed on various cloud or on-premise locations. Configure virtual users, geographic origin, repeats, ramp-ups, and pacing with just a few clicks.
- Customizable Dashboards: Use built-in dashboards, or quickly customize your own using a drag-and-drop interface to see what’s important to you. Merge analytics, including third-party data from monitoring tools, for a single view of performance.
Pricing
Paid plan only. Contact vendor for pricing.
Apica LoadTest
Test the scalability of all your applications, identify performance bottlenecks, and deliver remarkable customer experiences that transcend the ever-growing expectations of your end-users. Apica LoadTest supports a wide range of applications and devices — from legacy apps, e-commerce sites, and video streaming to mobile apps and IoT.
Highlighted Features
- Simulate real-world user behavior: from around the world, including mainland China, and test high-traffic applications with confidence using a website stress test.
- Advanced scripting tool: Easily create scripts for complex app load testing scenarios with the scripting tool without writing any code. Build scripts for any device by record/replay or enter transactions manually.
- Troubleshooting: Discover how your application responds to various loads with a load test and identify performance bottlenecks before they cause damage in production. Compare every release against benchmarks and ensure your digital service stands up to your scalability requirements.
- Integrations: Integrates out-of-the-box with several technologies, offering a very high degree of flexibility. It offers native integration with New Relic and AppDynamics
Pricing
Apica LoadTest offers a free trial. Contact vendor for pricing.
Apptim
Apptim empowers mobile developers, testers, and managers to easily test their native apps and analyze client-side performance to prevent any critical issues from going live. Measure app render times, power consumption, resource usage, capture crashes, and more on Android and iOS devices.
Highlighted Features
- Native App Testing: Apptim evaluates the performance of native Android and iOS mobile apps while running them on real devices.
- Performance and Bug Reports: After each test session, the tool generates a report with the performance metrics and bugs that you may find during your test session with Apptim.
- JIRA Integration: Publish and track bugs directly in this project management tool.
- Easy to Use: Apptim’s user interface is elegant and intuitive, making it a simple tool to use. Also, on the website, you can find detailed documentation that will help you through your first steps with the tool and you have support available every step of the way.
- Compare Two Test Sessions: If you repeat a test for a particular feature once a new version of your app is ready, you can compare the results to see if there are any big differences in the performance.
- Supports Appium Test Automation: Run your Appium tests and capture performance metrics while using Apptim and integrate with any CI server.
Pricing
Apptim has free and paid plans that also come with free trials.
Download Apptim for free here.
BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter provides performance and load testing as a service, and it now offers a brand new, complete Continuous Testing Platform to help enterprises shift-left. BlazeMeter provides a web-based interface for creating static load tests and can run any JMeter script for dynamic load tests. One of BlazeMeter’s main strengths is that it supplements JMeter (the top open-source load testing app) with “Enterprise” features such as distributed testing, real-time reporting, integration with developer tools for continuous integration (CI), and application performance monitoring (APM).
Highlighted Features
- 100% Compatible with Apache JMeter
- Create tests on any scale — up to 1 million concurrent users
- Set up tests within minutes
- Run scriptless tests or upload URL lists
- Run from the cloud or on-premise
- Run tests from multiple geo-locations
- Simulate mobile testing from real devices
- Facilitates team collaboration with script and report sharing
- Multi-tool support
- Integrations with leading CI and APM tools
- Desktop and mobile user experience monitoring
Pricing
BlazeMeter has free and paid plans with a free trial.
Eggplant
Eggplant is a testing solution that enables large businesses and test automation specialists to test any platform, application, or website through automated AI, machine learning & DevOps. Eggplant Performance provides sophisticated performance and load testing tools that can test the widest range of technology and can scale up to simulate any load you need but are still easy-to-use.
Highlighted Features
- Easy script generation: Eggplant Performance provides sophisticated protocol recording and data correlation to automatically generate user scripts.
- Broad technical coverage and customizable virtual users: Eggplant Performance has deep support for testing apps, but it also has in-built support for other common client-server technologies.
- Scalable and distributable: Eggplant Performance allows testers to partition virtual users any way they like across injectors. This means you can scale to any amount of users and from any location.
Pricing
Eggplant offers a paid subscription plan and a free trial.
Loadero
Loadero is a cloud-based performance and load testing tool that allows you to create faster performance tests and find system issues efficiently.
You can use Selenium, write test scripts in Java, JavaScript, or Python to conduct large-scale load testing or performance tests, and record web sessions for performing debugging. Configure the test by adding test users, groping, browser, location, counterfeit data feeds, network conditions, and more.
Loadero lets you set up multiple network settings and test your software in different network conditions. The cloud infrastructure of Loadero offers better scalability without letting you worry about maintenance.
This performance testing tool also helps you detect system limitations with comprehensive performance test reports, machine statistics, load times, screenshots, and recordings. In addition, Loadero features built-in validations to execute assertions automatically after the completion of the test run.
Features and Benefits
- Browser support: Loadero supports the five latest Google Chrome versions along with Mozilla Firefox.
- Reusable test codes: It lets you utilize the existing test setup to run load testing.
- Fake media: You can incorporate artificial media feed and simulate microphone and webcam inputs.
- Worldwide coverage: Perform tests from any of their 12 global locations.
- Pricing: It costs $250/month under the pay-as-you-go model.
SmartMeter.io
If you’re looking for an enterprise-level performance testing tool, then SmartMeter is a good option. It has best-in-class functionality and features, and it’s available at affordable rates. This tool helps you create test cases with ease using the embedded browser.
You can easily add testing into the continuous integration procedure by analyzing the acceptance parameters like maximum response time, errors, and throughput to automatically determine the test success.
SmartMeter provides you with advanced, in-depth reports, live test results with graph comparisons, trend analysis, etc., to fine-tune the software performance.
Features and Benefits
- Compatibility with JMeter: SmartMeter is compatible with JMeter to offer you all the features you love in this tool and perfect your tests.
- Distributed load testing: Create innumerable virtual users out of different global locations using load generators.
- Pricing: Starts at $39/month.
StormForge
StormForge allows you to perform load testing of your apps for performance and scalability automated right into CI/CD workflow at an affordable cost. It helps you increase the application uptime, throughput, decrease latency and application errors, and scale to more users.
The tool brings all these capabilities in fewer resources, involving no manual process, offering environmental sustainability, and helps you reduce your monthly bills on the cloud. You can capture actual production traffic and ensure the test delivers authentic traffic patterns.
It works in an open-workload model, simulates real-world scenarios accurately, and provides better error detection problems.
StormForge also lets you minimize issues and improve the end-user experience by ensuring app performance under load and meeting SLAs. It offers extensive analytics and reports to help interpret, benchmark, and compare results easily.
Features and Benefits
- Repeatable: Use Performance Testing as Code on your CI/CD pipeline.
- Cloud-native: Works well on Kubernetes.
- Supported programming languages: It includes Java, Nginx, Go, and Python.
- Integration: It integrates flawlessly with your ecosystem like cloud providers (AWS, DigitalOcean, GCP, IBM, Azure), monitoring tools (Prometheus, Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, and Circonus), DevOps tools (Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, and Rancher Labs).
- Pricing: There’s a free tier available for three tests/month, while paid plans start at $150/month per app.
LoadView
Empower your IT team to perform stress testing on your websites, APIs, and web applications with thousands of connections concurrently in actual browsers using the enterprise-level platform of LoadView.
LoadView leverages AWS and Azure to manage its cloud network so you can design multiple tests, even on complex apps. You can define users, duration, and behavior using various scenarios and simulate users virtually with load injectors from 30 global locations across the US, South America, Canada, APAC, and Europe.
The tool offers three load curves, Load Step curve, Dynamic Adjustable curve, and Goal-based curve, to check traffic spikes, scalability, and infrastructure limits.
Features and Benefits
- Advanced firewall: Run tests behind a firewall as LoadView offers dedicated IPs that you can allow and configure.
- Video recording: Capture website or app rendering with video recording for better analysis and review.
- Other features: Reference servers, detailed waterfall charts, dynamic variables, and load injector controls.
- Pricing: Starts at $199/month for 1000 concurrent users.
NeoLoad
NeoLoad is a continuous performance testing tool to automate your application and API load testing. It provides intuitive design and maintenance of tests and offers realistic user behavior simulation.
It simplifies test creations with conditions, loops, and drag-and-drop controls with a robust codeless design. For advanced cases, you can use JavaScript. It uses a YAML-based format that is human readable and domain-specific.
NeoLoad also provides you with detailed reports after test completion, allows you to perform infrastructure monitoring, and you can also integrate APM to get better analysis and validate builds with automatic SLAs.
Features and Benefits
- Supported technologies: It supports web frameworks and protocols like HTML, Angular, HTTP/2, WebSocket, etc.; packaged apps like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, IBM, etc.
- Advanced correlation: Correlates dynamic parameters with automatic handling and detects app-specific parameters along with predefined rules like .Net, Siebel, JSF, etc.
- Integration: Integrates with DevOps tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, Git, etc.; SOAP/REST support, Selenium, Tricentis Tosca, Dynatrace, Azure, Jenkins, Git, etc.
- Pricing: Contact them for a customized plan.
LoadUI Pro
You can load test your SOAP and REST APIs, microservices, and databases using LoadUI Pro, which is part of SmartBear’s ReadyAPI offering. With it, you can check the scalability and speed of your APIs and preview their performance. It was released in 2011 and written in Java, Groovy, and JavaFX.
Its standard version is open source, but the Pro version is brought to you by SmartBear. Forget about maintenance or investing too much as LoadUI Pro is a fully cloud-based performance testing tool.
Apart from these capabilities, LoadUI Pro offers parallel load testing, endpoint load testing, isolated load testing, server monitoring, and much more. In addition, you can add more functionality at runtime using 3rd-party plugins.
Features and Benefits
- Compatibility: Works with Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
- Test reusing: You can reuse functional tests that already exist in your pipelines to save time.
- Integration: Integrates with SoapUI, a tool for functional testing.
- Pricing: Starts at $4,999/year.
Silk Performer
Conduct powerful and realistic stress and load testing using Silk Performer for your mobile, web, and enterprise apps. It pinpoints issue causes and location and ensures that server and application uptimes during peak traffic.
Provide better user experience with design scripts that help uncover issues and use end-to-end diagnostics to detect, monitor, resolve, and isolate problems. It features customizable reports so you can generate graphs and reports and customize them based on your preference.
With Cloud scalability, you can simulate peak-load of any size effortlessly and test faster by reusing existing performance tests and run them in different scenarios without changing scripts.
Silk Performer has three components, namely, Performance Explorer, True Log Explorer, and Workbench. It offers built-in VPNs that allow you to test and resolve internet-based apps under heavy loads.
Other essential capabilities of Silk Performer include user-friendly parameterization and correlation, Agent Health Control, resource management, integrated server monitoring, version controls, and more.
Micro Focus also offers another project-based load and performance testing tool called LoadRunner. It tests applications and measures system performance and behavior under load. Simulating thousands of concurrent users, you can record and analyze application performance.
Features and Benefits
- Supported protocols: HTTPS, HTTP, HTML, SMTP, POP, TCP, IP, FTP, .NET, SOAP, XML, LDAP, and more.
- Global locations: Execute tests out of more than 50 international locations.
- Supported technologies: Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AWS.
- Pricing: Contact them for a quote. A free trial is also available.
Conclusion
Performance testing tools play a vital role in any quality assurance process as they help achieve maximum uptime and optimum user experience. Performance testing is a procedure that helps achieve maximum server performance as well as application performance which result in maximum productivity and scalability of the system.