There are many software performance testing tools available in the market to test your website application in every possible way. But in this article I’ll share my list of best in class performance testing tools, which can be used for assessing performance and availability of your web servers.
Here are some free performance testing software.
SoapUI
If your team has complicated API testing scenarios and is weighted toward QA/test engineers, SoapUI is the tool to try first—especially if the team does mostly API testing.
This fully functional test tool is completely dedicated to API testing, so why produce a solution from scratch? And if for some reason you need to create a custom workflow or functionality, you can code up your solution in SoapUI using Groovy.
Karate
Karate, created by Intuit a few years ago, has matured into a stable tool with unique functionality. For example, it offers API testing, API testing doubles, and API performance testing all in one framework.
And with the its latest update, Karate also supports UI test automation—making it a true, end-to-end unified testing framework. It’s constantly being updated, so be sure to check it out regularly to get up to speed on all the latest features.
Tests are written using a BDD, Gherkin-like syntax. But unlike most BDD frameworks (Cucumber, JBehave, SpecFlow), you don’t need to write step definitions. Karate has already created all the step definitions you need to start testing APIs.
If you’re new to programming or automation, Karate is easy to use, since you don’t need any Java knowledge. If this is your situation, Karate might be the perfect choice.
Fiddler
Fiddler lets you monitor, manipulate, and reuse HTTP requests. It does many things that allow you to debug website issues, and, with one of its many extensions, you can accomplish even more.
One of those, the APITest extension, greatly validates the behavior of web APIs. (Validators offer a lightweight way to judge the success or failure of a test.) For more hard-core API testing development, use the FiddlerCore.NET class library to build your API testing infrastructure.
Fiddler is a great choice for teams that use .NET languages, since you can develop your tests using any .NET language you wish.
LoadNinja
LoadNinja by SmartBear allows you to quickly create scriptless sophisticated load tests, reduces testing time by 50%, replaces load emulators with real browsers, and get actionable, browser-based metrics, all at ninja speed.
You can easily capture client-side interactions, debug in real-time, and identify performance problems immediately. LoadNinja empowers teams to increase their test coverage without sacrificing quality by removing the tedious efforts of dynamic correlation, script translation, and script scrubbing.
With LoadNinja, engineers, testers and product teams can focus more on building apps that scale and focus less on building load testing scripts.
Features:
- Scriptless load test creation & playback with InstaPlay recorder.
- Real browser load test execution at scale.
- VU Debugger – debug tests in real-time.
- VU Inspector – manage virtual user activity in real-time.
- Hosted on the cloud, no server machine & upkeep required.
- Sophisticated browser-based metrics with analytics and reporting features.
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Apigee
Apigee is a cross-cloud API testing tool, allowing users to measure and test API performance, supports and build API using other editors like Swagger. Apigee is recognized as one of the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2019 for Full Lifecycle API Management for the fourth consecutive time.
- It is multi-step and powered by Javascript
- Allows the design monitor, deploy, and scale APIs
- Identify performance issues by tracking API traffic, error rates, and response times
- Easily create API proxies from the Open API Specification and deploy them in the cloud
- Cloud, on-premise, or hybrid deployment model on a single code base
- PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, and PII for apps and APIs
- Apigee is purpose-built for digital business, and the data-rich mobile-driven APIs and apps that power it.
Starting from version 4.19.01 in February 2019, Apigee gives users even more flexibility to manage their APIs with features like Open API 3.0 support, TLS security, self-healing with apigee-monit, virtual host management improvements, and more software support. The latest 4.50.00.08 (March 2021) released with minor bug fixes and security improvements.
Website: https://cloud.google.com/apigee/
Pricing: Contact Sales
JMeter
Although JMeter was created for load testing, many folks also use it for functional API testing.
JMeter includes all the functionality you need to test an API, plus extra features that can enhance your API testing efforts. For example, JMeter can automatically work with CSV files, so your teams can quickly produce unique parameter values for your API tests. It also integrates with Jenkins, so you can include your API tests in your CI pipelines.
If you plan to create API functional tests that you would also like to leverage in your performance tests, you can kill two birds with one stone by using JMeter as your main API testing system.
JMeter is widely used for functional API testing although it is actually created for load testing.
- Supports replaying of test results
- Automatically work with CSV files, allowing the team to quickly create unique parameter values for the API tests.
- Users can include the API tests in CI pipelines thank to the integration between JMeter and Jenkins
- It can be used for both static as well as dynamic resources performance testing
Since the most recent release in Jan 2021, JMeter 5.4.1 has been packed with multiple features and enhancements: new themes, revamped Groovy library, many bug fixes, visual representation of disabled elements and updated JMeter templates for functional testing.
Website: https://jmeter.apache.org/
Pricing: Open-source
Rest-Assured
Rest-Assured is an open-source Java Domain-specific language that makes testing REST service more simple.
- Have a bunch of baked-in functionalities, which means users don’t have to code things from scratch.
- Integrates seamlessly with Serenity automation framework, so that users can combine the UI and REST tests all in one framework that generates awesome reports.
- Support BDD Given/When/Then syntax
- Users don’t necessarily need to be an HTTP expert
Starting from version 4.0.0, REST Assured requires at least Java 8, instead of Java 6 as was previously required. This version also added support for Apache Johnzon and fixed a lot of issues with the initial OSGi support. The latest version, 2021–05–21: REST Assured 4.4.0, is released with various improvements and bug fixes.
Website: http://rest-assured.io/
Pricing: Open-source
Assertible
Assertible is an API testing tool which concentrates on the automation and reliability.
- Support for automating API tests through each step of a continuous integration and delivery pipeline.
- Support for running API tests after deployments and integrates with familiar tools like GitHub, Slack, and Zapier.
- Support validating HTTP responses with turn-key assertions such as JSON Schema validation and JSON Path data integrity checks
- The Sync feature allows testers to update their tests when their specifications change, so users no longer have to manually update their tests after adding new parameters or changing the response of API.
In October 2019, Assertible added the latest feature called Encrypted variables. This feature provides a new way to store tokens, passwords, and secret data fields required by tests to improve API testing security practices. Encrypted variables are not only trivial to use, but build on the cryptographically sound methodology for safe storage.
Website: https://assertible.com/
Pricing: Free – $25/month
Karate DSL
Karate DSL is a new API testing tool which help create scenarios for API-based BDD tests in a simple way without writing step definitions. Those definitions have been created by KarateDSL so that users can kickstart the API testing quickly.
- Build on top of Cucumber-JVM
- Can run a test and generate reports like any standard Java project
- A test can be written without any Java knowledge required
- Tests are easy to write even for non-programmers
- Supports configuration switching/staging, multi-threaded parallel execution
Karate UI is now a distinct Maven artifact rather than part of the open-source tool’s core, as of version 0.9.3. This version now includes built-in support for WebSocket, which is based on the async capability. The most recent revision, Karate UI 0.9.6 was released in August 2020 with a slew of new features, including Karate Robot Windows for Windows Desktop app automation, redesigned HTML reports, call-Single-Cache, and enhanced tree walking in UI Tests.
Website: https://github.com/intuit/karate
Pricing: Open-source
Swagger
Swagger is an API testing tool that allows users to start their functional, security, and performance testing right from the Open API Specifications. Swagger tooling and Ready API platform make it easy to quickly create, manage, and execute API tests in the pipeline.
- Swagger Inspector provides capabilities to inspect API request-responses, and make sure they perform as expected
- Import user’s API definitions to easily validate schema rules, automatically generate assertions against endpoints and inject synthetic data into parameters
- Generate complex load scenarios to test the scale and performance of API
- Support all types of services from REST, SOAP to GraphQL
Swagger Hub Domains were added to Open API Spec version 3.1 in 2020. Developers may utilize this functionality to save commonly used objects, path items, and responses in separate files that can then be accessed across numerous API definitions. These reusable Domains may be versioned, published, and shared for big teams to provide collaborative input. The latest version Open API Spec version 3.51.1 on June 2021 came with minor bugs fixed.
Website: https://swagger.io/
Pricing: Open-source
Rest Console
REST Console is a REST/HTTP Client for Google Chrome that allows users to visualize and construct custom HTTP requests to test with any RESTful API service.
- Construct POST or PUT body via raw input
- Support to modify custom headers through intuitive UI
- Allows you to easily create query parameters
- It can be used for several authentications: Plain, Basic, OAuth + Custom
- Supports customizable interface
Since the most recent release, Rest Console v4.0.2 has been upgraded with several features to enhance user experience and bug fixes, such as oAuth improvements, Collapsible sections, Clickable Links in Response, UI enhancements.
Website: https://github.com/ahmadnassri/restconsole
Pricing: Open-source
API Fortress
API Fortress is a continuous testing platform for APIs that enables testers and developers to create and automate functional tests.
- Intuitive UI that is easy to use at any skill level
- Accelerate your continuous API Testing with plug-and-play
- Automate tests as part of a CI pipeline
- Support Test REST, SOAP, GraphQL, Web Services, and Microservices
- Web-based collaborative tool for teams; the feature helps testers work within a browser and requires no downloads.
With the latest version on September 2020, they have new features: Allow a test to continue after a fatal error, Improved Multipart for on-prem and load testing, and K/V store for mocking services. Also, minor bugs were fixed from the previous version.
Website: https://apifortress.com/
Pricing: Contact Sales
Pyresttest
Pyresttest is a Python-based REST API testing platform. Since Pyresttest supports tests in JSON or YAML config files, no coding knowledge is required.
- Generate/extract and validate mechanisms to build full test scenarios
- It is minimal dependencies (pycurl, pyyaml, optionally future), which allows easy deployment on-server for smoke tests/health checks
- Return exit codes on failure to slot into automated configuration management tools
Pyresttest works on Linux or Mac with Python 2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+ (with module ‘future’ installed). In Mar 2016, the latest version v1.7.1 was released with minor bug fixes only.
Website: https://github.com/svanoort/pyresttest
Pricing: Open-source
Fiddler
Developed by Telerik, Fiddler has long been the tool of choice for developers and testers who build and verify APIs exposed over HTTP(S). It is a free and powerful debugging proxy tool used for testing restful web services.
- Debug traffic from macOS, Windows, or Linux systems and iOS or Android mobile devices.
- Ensure the proper cookies, headers, and cache directives are transferred between the client and the server.
- Fiddler’s API Composer makes it easy to quickly test, group, and organize your API requests.
- With Auto Responder, mock requests and responses are effortlessly created and organized, which allows you to test the websites without changing code.
- Supports any framework, including .NET, Java, Ruby, etc.
In the latest version, “Fiddler Everywhere v2.0.0” updated in June 2021, the workflows have been improved to enhance user experience. Starting from this version, the Rule Builder can be redesigned and more powerful with Auto Responder.
Website: https://www.telerik.com/fiddler
Pricing: Free Trial — $10/ month
Airborne
Airborne is an API automation testing framework. It is a Ruby-based RSpec driven framework.
- Since Airborne is only a programming framework, it has no user interface apart from the text file to create code.
- Testers need to remember a few key methods in the toolset and some ruby and RSpec fundamentals to use Airborne.
In July 2020, Airborne was updated to version v0.3.5 with minor bug fixes.
Website: https://github.com/brooklynDev/airborne
Pricing: Open-source
Conclusion
There is a myth in IT that free software is necessarily inferior to its proprietary counterparts. The truth is that there are many open source software designed for enterprise level use that are just as capable as their paid counterparts. These are tools that proves it.