API Performance Testing Tools Online

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The world of technology has advanced to a point that the once unthinkable is becoming more and more of a reality. More and more businesses are using an app or a website to promote their products or generate revenue. This means that finding the performance of these applications has become crucial in many small or large businesses. For anyone who is not in the loop when it comes to the technology market, you need to know exactly what API performance testing is.

Performance testing for APIs is necessary to ensure that the application is doing what they are designed to do.  It makes one look at how the application behaves with different types of traffic, the number of connections, time is taken to respond to requests, load on the application servers, etc.

Apigee

Apigee is another useful tool for API testing. Apigee, part of Google Cloud, offers API management features. Apigee allows users to measure and test API performance and support and build APIs using other editors like Swagger. Apigee is purpose-built for digital business, and the data-rich mobile-driven APIs and apps that power it.

Pros:

  • It identifies performance issues by tracking API traffic, error rates, and response times.
  • It supports Node.js
  • It is straightforward to control.
  • It is multi-step and powered by JavaScript.

Cons:

  • Prohibited from using JSON.stringify on Apigee objects (tokens).
  • Only one user can be active in a proxy at a time.
  • UI allows users to add target servers, but users must utilize the API to turn on SSL.

RestSharp

RestSharp is another testing solution that you can use for API testing. It allows you to develop .Net APIs and testing them with the same tool. RestSharp becomes very handy for Windows developers using REST or SOAP APIs to communicate with external data.

Pros:

  • It is easy to use.
  • Supports both asynchronous and synchronous requests.

Cons:

  • Lacks strong developer tools.
  • Can only work with .Net based applications

API Fortress

API Fortress is arguably the most powerful API testing and monitoring solution for REST and SOAP APIs. It satisfies many requirements and proves to be a worthy API testing tool. API Fortress allows full API testing, including regression testing. Like other tools on the list, it comes with SLA monitoring, alerts, notifications, and reporting.

Pros:

  • It enables Automated tests as part of a CI pipeline.
  • Robust notification and data integrations.
  • Continuous monitoring for APIs, as well as load testing.
  • Simple one-click automation. Test during development and deployments (CI/CD), and monitor functional uptime.

Cons:

  • No free pricing tiers.
  • Limited options for creating API tests using code.

Airborne

Airborne is an open-source Ruby-based RSpec-driven API testing framework. This tool doesn’t have a UI. It just provides the text file to write the code. It can work with Rack applications. To use Airborne, you just need to remember a few key methods in the toolset and some Ruby and RSpec fundamentals.

Pros:

  • It can work with APIs written in Ruby on Rails.
  • Works with Rack applications like Sinatra and Grape.

HttpMaster

HttpMaster is a development and test tool for REST web services and web API applications. It is a universal HTTP tool that can also be used to develop other web application types, for example, for testing HTML forms. It also has an elegant and easy-to-use interface, a small and compact installation package, and does not require advanced technical skills.

Pros:

  • You can use request chaining to leverage request items to include some data from the previous request with the next request.
  • Automated API app testing.
  • Automated RESTful service testing.
  • Parallel Execution.

Cons:

  • Supports Windows only.
  • No JSON formatting support.

StresStimulus

StresStimulus targets application scenarios that are difficult to test with other tools. It automatically fixes playback errors thanks to its proprietary autocorrelation. StresStimulus records user actions and replays them to emulate variable usage patterns. It also monitors load impact on application responsiveness and server infrastructure. The result analyzer finds hidden concurrency errors left unexposed by functional testing and includes detailed application performance metrics.

Features:

  • End-to-end Test Wizard covers all steps from recording to test results, which reduces the learning curve
  • On-premise or cloud testing supported with multiple load generators
  • Works as a stand-alone tool or Fiddler add-on
  • Exports script to Visual Studio test format to help with scenarios that fail when recorded in Visual Studio directly
  • Manual scripting is not required but available; supports three scripting languages

Apache Jmeter

JMeter is an open-source tool that can be used for performance and load testing for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services. It is one of the best load testing tools that is mainly used as website load testing tools for web service applications.

Features:

  • This free tool doesn’t demand state of the art infrastructure for load testing and supports multiple load injectors managed by a single controller
  • It is one of the performance test tools which is highly portable and supports 100% all the Java based apps
  • Less scripting efforts as compared to other api performance testing tools because of its user-friendly GUI
  • Simple charts and graphs sufficient for analyzing key load related statistics and resource usage monitors.
  • Supports Integrated real-time, Tomcat collectors for Monitoring

Protocols

Web : HTTP, HTTPS, WebServices : XML, SOAP, etc., Java based protocols, FTP

HP Performance Tester

This is an enterprise performance testing version of Loadrunner and a platform that enabled both global standardization and the formation of Performance CoE.

Features:

  • Lower the cost of distributed load testing
  • Scale from single projects to a full-scale testing Center of Excellence (CoEs) that consolidates hardware, standardizes best practices, and leverages global testing resources
  • Reduce the risk of deploying systems that do not meet performance requirements through the use of effective enterprise load tester tool
  • It is one of the best performance testing tools that lowers hardware and software costs by accurately predicting system capacity
  • Pinpoint the root cause of application performance problems quickly and accurately
  • It is one of the Effective performance test tools for utilization tracking
  • Browser based access to global test resources and optimal usage of load generator farm.

Gatling

Gatling is an open-source load testing tool for web applications, designed for DevOps and Continuous Integration. It is designed for ease of use, maintainability, and high performance. Gatling includes a web recorder and colorful reports.

Gatling is an open-source tool for load testing web applications that also offers an enterprise version. Similar to Artillery, it runs test plans based on simulation scripts written in Scala.

Pros:

  • Resource-efficient due to its underlying technology based on Scala
  • Ships with a GUI based test recorder
  • Test recorder generates Scala scripts
  • Full flexibility with scripts and its powerful API
  • Well documented guides
  • Has community extensions and official plugins
  • Can load and transform external data
  • Supports HTTP

Cons:

  • You need to get familiar with Scala once you want to advance
  • Might not fit into every developer’s workload

Blazemeter

Blazemeter is a commercial load testing PaaS that is compatible with JMeter. It can run functional and performance tests just like any other tool but also offers resource monitoring that can be combined into tests.

Pros:

  • Functional and performance tests
  • Other tools such as mock services and API monitoring
  • Test recorder as browser extension
  • GUI and load tests can be run in the same test suite
  • GUI tools return screenshots and waterfalls, similar to browser dev tools
  • Extensive metrics and reports
  • Can report server hardware usage
  • Compatible with Swagger/OpenAPI

Cons:

  • Not easy to use. Can be overwhelming and cumbersome for first-time users
  • Free tier includes 10 tests. Heavy pricing tiers for smaller projects.

Conclusion

API performance is all about getting the most of your server resources. This is why it’s important to make sure your application can handle large loads of data, user traffic, and everything else you throw at it. What works for smaller projects doesn’t necessarily apply to larger ones. They require a different approach, and this is where API performance tools come in handy.

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