Best Performance Testing Tools for Web Applications is your one-stop guide for all things load testing. Learn the tools, basic concepts, and performance metrics so you can choose the best testing tool for your project.
A website’s performance is a major factor in its success. These best performance testing tools for web applications will help you build, test and maintain a high-performance site from start to finish.
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is another free API testing tool for API, Web, Desktop App, and Mobile applications. It provides easy development by including all frameworks and plugins in one package. It is suitable for both beginners and experts with the Manual and Scripting modes.
Pros:
- Katalon supports SOAP and RESTful requests.
- It can be used for automated and exploratory testing.
- It supports CI/CD integration.
- It is a complete package and framework.
Cons:
- It is difficult to troubleshoot issues.
- It is hard to debug code, and there are no compile-time error checks.
- It does not have support for distributed testing.
JMeter
Apache Jmeter is another open-source software for load and performance testing of applications. It is widely used for functional API testing. It comes with many API testing functionalities and a bunch of features to make the process more efficient.
Pros:
- JMeter can be utilized in static and dynamic resource performance testing.
- It allows developers to replay test results.
- The interface of JMeter is user-friendly and can be used in a command-line interface.
- JMeter supports per-thread cookies.
Cons:
- It requires skilled testers.
- It doesn’t support Javascript and, by extension, doesn’t automatically support AJAX requests.
- Memory consumption is high in GUI mode, which causes it to give out errors for many users.
Karate DSL
Karate DSL, based on the Cucumber library, helps create scenarios for API-based BDD tests in a simple way without the need to write. It combines API test-automation, mocks, and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. It allows testers to create meaningful tests for web services using a domain-specific language.
Pros:
- Karate DSL supports multi-thread parallel execution.
- It allows configuration switching.
- Karate DSL is a good option for testing GraphQL.
- It supports XML as well as JSON.
Cons:
- The tool doesn’t have Auth schemes out of the box.
- There is no ‘Find Usage’, auto renaming.
- Code support becomes very time consuming and expensive.
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 test 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.
Telerik Test Studio
Telerik’s Test Studio is a standalone testing tool for UI, REST API, and load tests. It focuses a lot on creating tests and integrating them with existing workloads such as CI/CD, bug tracking, etc.
Pros:
- Ships with a test recorder
- Has a built-in CLI tools
- Wide variety of supported protocols/application types such as web, PWA, MVC, etc.
- Reports
- Integrates into popular SCM, CI/CD and bug trackers
- Can import data from Fiddler
- GUI lovers get used to the UI fairly easy
Cons:
- Heavy UI
- Runs only on Windows
- Focuses too much on .NET Framework
StresStimulus
StresStimulus is popular with performance testing services because it is capable of handling scenarios that may be difficult to test using other tools. It works by automatically fixing playback errors using its unique autocorrelation feature. The tool records user actions before replaying them to emulate changing usage patterns. It also keeps track of load impact on the responsiveness of the software and the server infrastructure. It can also detect hidden concurrency errors and provides in-depth performance metrics.
The key features of this performance testing tool are as follows:
- Cloud or on-premise testing using multiple load generators
- End-to-end Test Wizard reduces the learning curve by covering all steps
- Option of manual scripting is available, but not required. The tool supports upto 3 scripting languages.
- Allows script export to Visual Studio test format
- Can be used as a Fiddler add-on or an independent tool
Conclusion
The WAPT Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing performance testing tools for web applications. These tools are designed to give users an edge in their job performance while enabling them to test the speed and effectiveness of their applications. The foundation’s mission statement reads, “to provide leading-edge testing tools that can be used by developers and corporations to evaluate the performance of their websites, while contributing to the enhancement of the industry.” The best performance testing tools should be incorporated into your maintenance plans so that you will not run into problems with follow-up features down the line.