Performance testing is an important part of any Quality Assurance effort. These tools are helpful for developers who are working to make sure their sites are performing well before launch, or are running live.
The list below are key performance testing tools you should take advantage of in your 2021.
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.
Kinsta APM
Need a hassle-free performance monitoring solution for your WordPress website? Try Kinsta APM. It’s designed to let you find and resolve performance issues on your Kinsta-hosted sites. With a simple and easy-to-use UI, Kinsta APM is for everyone, whether they’re beginners to experts. Plus, it’s available in 10 languages under MyKinsta.
Kinsta APM provides insights on slow PHP transactions, external requests, MySQL queries, and more. You can debug database queries, non-optimized themes or plugins, and longer API calls and external URL requests, along with identifying slowest, median, and average transactions.
It’s helpful for everyone, from agencies and ecommerce site owners to developers, by helping them find and troubleshoot performance issues quickly while reducing their expenditure on costly APM tools.
Features and Benefits:
- Customer support team: With over ten years of experience, Kinsta’s seasoned customer support team will resolve all your site issues with 24/7 availability and a 100% solve rate. You can chat with them directly through MyKinsta and get instant replies.
- Pricing: The tool is free for every website that Kinsta hosts, no matter what plan you’ve chosen. You can also book a live demo to test the performance yourself.
WebLOAD
Released in 1997, WebLOAD by RadView is a performance and load testing tool for your software and helps you scale your business. It offers capabilities like performance, integrity, and scalability testing.
This enterprise-grade tool is capable of simulating thousands of users concurrently so you can test heavy traffic loads and report weak points, constraints, and performance bottlenecks in your application.
Use WebLOAD for website load testing, continuous testing, cloud load testing, and more. The tool can generate load from the cloud or on-premise machines and offers an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for recording, editing, debugging test scripts visually.
Its proxy-based recorder also records your HTTP activities and generates tests in JavaScript. You can also edit or enhance it using multiple tools in IDE. WebLOAD offers analysis reports for performance data that help users to identify bottlenecks.
Features and Benefits
- Correlation: Correlates dynamic values automatically like session IDs and enables scripts to execute with different virtual clients.
- Protocol support: Supports HTTPS, HTTP, and XML.
- Integration: Integrates with tools such as Selenium, Jenkins, etc.
- Customer support team: You can reach out to them via phone call, fax, or contact form.
- Pricing: There is a free trial option available for up to 50 users. Contact their team to get a quote.
Apache JMeter
Next up on the list is a famous load testing tool: Apache JMeter. Apache JMeter helps you measure and analyze software performance. It’s an open source tool based on Java that people use mainly for testing web app performance, but it also finds usage on other services.
It can test performance for both dynamic and static resources, as well as dynamic web apps. In addition, you can use it to simulate heavy loads over a server, network/object, or group of different servers to test its strength and analyze total performance under varying load types.
The tool is easy to use and doesn’t demand highly sophisticated infrastructure for testing, and is compatible with many load injectors manageable with one controller. Plus, it has a user-friendly GUI that needs less scripting compared to other load testing tools. Its simple graphs and charts are enough to analyze primary load-related data and resource utilization stats.
Its fully-featured IDE allows faster testing creation, recording, and debugging. JMeter supports CLI to load the performance test from an OS compatible with Java, including Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, etc.
Features and Benefits
- Protocol support: HTTPS, HTTP, SAOP, XML, FTP, etc.
- Supported technologies: PHP, NodeJS, ASP.NET, database, MOM, LDAP, Java objects, TCP, etc.
- Correlation: offers effortless correlation and lets you extract data from top response formats like HTML, XML, JSON, etc.
- Extensibility: It’s highly extensible and works with pluggable samplers, scriptable samples like Groovy, pluggable timers, data visualization, and analysis plugins, and more.
- Integration: Integrates with open source libraries such as Jenkins, Gradle, Maven, etc.
- Customer support: They have a large community of developers and contributors with whom you can interact. They also have maintained tutorials so you can understand the tool better.
- Pricing: JMeter is free and open source.
LoadNinja
Create your load tests and run them quickly using LoadNinja by SmartBear. It helps you diagnose app performance issues with highly accurate and actionable data. It provides results that are easy to read and doesn’t need extensive programming.
This tool helps product teams, testers, and engineers focus on building their software that scales while spending less time creating test scripts.
LoadNinja allows you to record client-side interactions, identify performance issues quickly, and debug in real-time without sacrificing test quality by eliminating script scrubbing, translation, and dynamic correlation efforts. With its TrueLoad technology, it’ll also let you test the actual end-user experience on multiple browsers to save more than 60% of your effort. It is highly efficient and precise in recording load tests, and it replays them instantly with no coding needed.
Analyze software performance data such as strep times, asynchronous calls, processed resources, navigation timings on your web interface, and diagnose issues using a machine learning assistant.
Perform continuous software performance testing, move faster with quality and test coverage, and automate the tests. It requires no setup or maintenance as the service is cloud-based.
Note: SmartBear offered a similar offering previously called LoadComplete. While it’s still available to use, it hasn’t been updated since 2019. We recommend you avoid it.
Features and Benefits
- Integration: Automated tests by using their custom CI/CD plugins or REST API.
- Customer Support: You can reach out to the LoadNinja user community to find answers or go through their comprehensive documentation and FAQs.
- Pricing: The entry price of this tool is $1,439/year for 100 virtual users and 100 load hours.
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.
The Performance Testing Process
The goal of performance testing is the same for every software, though the methodology can vary a bit. So, here’s what a typical performance testing process looks like:
- Choosing the testing environment: First, select your test environment, performance testing tools, and production environment. Select appropriate software, hardware, network configuration, etc., to use for your test.
- Identifying performance metrics: Next, identify software performance metrics such as response time, throughput, transactions, load time, and resource distribution like CPU, memory, and disk space.
- Planning the test: Identify test scenarios covering user variability, target metrics, and test data. It will help you plan and design a few models of your performance tests.
- Configuring the chosen test environment: Organize the elements of your test environment in addition to the performance testing tools you need for different test cases. For example, to test your website’s performance, performance testing tools such as Kinsta APM can help.
- Implementing the test design: Create your performance test depending upon your test design, which will help your team stay on track during the entire testing process instead of getting confused.
- Executing performance testing: Now, you can start the test. As it runs, monitor the trial and collect the resulting data so your developers can use it to improve the software performance.
- Analyze, report, and retest: After you have the test results in hand, analyze the data and plan what you need to overcome the highlighted issues. Lastly, troubleshoot the problems and execute the performance testing again to track the improvements. Keep retesting until you troubleshoot all of the problems detected.
Conclusion
These performance and stress testing tools can help you to ensure that you have a performant website or web app. With the right tools, you can find out which plugins have issues, where your page load times are bottlenecked, and what kinds of issues your users run into as they visit your sites.