Have you ever wondered how to test page loads in your application? Or were you ever in need of some free online tools that can help evaluate your site’s responsiveness under load? If you answered, “yes” to either of these questions, then the blog post below is for you.
It explores several ways in which you can test the load of your pages, including free (and paid) tools that allow you to evaluate your app’s server performance.
Neotys Neoload – Design code-less load performance test scripts for large, complex applications using a graphical user interface
Neotys Neoload helps to design, maintain and run performance tests as code and analyze results within continuous integration pipelines using pre-packaged plugins for CI/CD tools and the NeoLoad API. Easily set up testing resources as needed.
This tool has a clean, colorful, and strategically organized user interface that makes returning to the software for each task a pleasure. Thus, they scored well in the UX segment of the evaluation process.
One critique of this software to be wary of is that the charging mechanism on the cloud is not atomic in nature and has a dependency on a local machine. Additionally, the project gets harder to manage as the script grows.
Neotys Neoload starts at $6024/month and has a free 30-day trial.Visit Website
BlazeMeter – A shift-left testing platform for enterprises that need API, GUI functional & performance testing, mock services, and API monitoring
BlazeMeter allows for Selenium functional testing with no coding necessary. Simulate thousands or millions of virtual users from over 55 geo-locations, leveraging your favorite open source tools: Apache JMeter, Selenium, Gatling, Grinder, Locust and more.
This tool scores well in the Features – Reporting and Analytics segment of the evaluation criteria, as status report types and assertion types are very useful when creating test scripts. Reporting and graph features are very accurate, making them a key component of the software.
A downside of this tool is that Blazemeter does not integrate well or easily with Jmeter if you started with or intend to incorporate that tool at all.
BlazeMeter starts at $99/month and has a freemium version of the software.Visit Website
Load Impact – LoadImpact, soon to rebrand as k6 Cloud, is a cloud service used to load test the performance of websites, apps, and APIs
LoadImpact is a cloud service to load test the performance of websites, apps, and APIs that has specifically focused on API load testing in the new k6.io app, with a completely revamped Test Builder. Plus, they have an improved browser session recorder and an improved results page.
A standout component of this software is it’s easy to support of various ‘cl technologies’. Additionally, the reporting, graphs, and pictures are aesthetically pleasing and very readable.
This tool would benefit in some better help sections/training documents in order to outline the different components of the software and website. They lost a few marks in the evaluation for Usability but this certainly isn’t a deal-breaker, as many aspects of the tool are intuitive anyways.
Load Impact starts at $99/month and has a free trial.Visit Website
LoadFocus – No-code testing to find out how many users your website or API can handle; easily run tests within the browser from multiple locations
An easy and cost-effective way to test your websites, mobile and web applications, web services and APIs with features like load testing, website speed testing, mobile emulation, automated website testing, SEO/PWA/speed monitoring, and software consultancy services.
LoadFocus has a very reasonable price-per-month, scoring them favorably in the Value for Cost section of the evaluation review as far as paid load testing tools are concerned.
One weakness of the tool is that communication between the user and the LF team could be clearer and better implemented. For example, there have been some complaints about not receiving confirmation emails and other expected communication items.
LoadFocus starts at $22.60/month and has a free 14-day trial.Visit Website
8. Parasoft Load Test – Load testing module that enables users to take SOAtest functional test projects and leverage them for performance testing
Parasoft Load Test enables users to take SOAtest functional test projects and leverage them for performance testing. The Load Test Continuum (LTC) web-based reporting app makes performance testing a part of the CI/CD process and implements performance test automation.
One of the best parts of the software is that minimal experience/training is needed to get started. Users can easily pull from Excel or XML files, as well, and automating the APIs is intuitive.
With a rather hefty up-front cost, Parasoft Load Test lost a few marks in the Value for Cost section of the evaluation criteria, as the price tag may deter some. It is important to note that the cost listed below includes the enterprise edition, desktop licenses, and training for a team of 5.
Parasoft Load Test starts at $50,000 and has a free trial.Visit Website
nGrinder 
nGrinder‘s GitHub page describes it as having been designed to be an enterprise-level performance engineering solution. It was developed to make stress testing easy and to provide a platform that allows you to create, execute, and monitor tests.
Features:
- You can write your tests using Jython or Groovy to create test scenarios and create stress against JVM using multiple agents.
- It can extend tests with customer libraries like jar and py
- Allows you to monitor the state of your performance agents load generation
- Take care of automatically collecting test results from distributed agents after tests
It currently has 1.3k stars on GitHub.
The Grinder
The Grinder is a Java-based framework. It provides you with easy-to-run and -create distributed testing solutions using many load generator machines to capture your end-users response times. So you don’t have to worry about any virtual users restrictions.
- You can perform load testing on any system that has a Java API
- A nice GUI console
- It automatically handles the management of client connections and cookies
Gatling
Gatling is a stress tool built on Scala, Akka, and Netty.
This modern architecture approach it uses allows you to test and measure your application’s end-to-end performance and easily scale up your virtual users.
- It has a simple yet powerful DSL.
- Easy to extend
- If you’re into Scala and the benefits it brings, this is the load testing tool for you.
- It has a scenario recorder
- Allows you to take a shift-left code approach to performance testing
It currently has 5.1k stars on GitHub.
To learn more about Gatling check out the Founder of Gatling Stephane Landelle’s PerfGuildsession on Load Testing Done Right with Gatling.
k6
k6 is a developer-centric, open-source load testing tool for testing the performance of your back-end infrastructure.
You can also use k6 to start including performance testing into your continuous integration pipelines.
k6 is also Modern load testing tools built with Go and JavaScript so it integrates well into most developers’ workflow.
- Clean scripting API
- Provides distributed & Cloud execution
- Cool REST API orchestration ability
It currently has 11.7k stars on GitHub.
Tsung
Tsung is an open-source, multi-protocol distributed load testing tool.
- Can monitor a client’s CPU, memory, and network traffic
- It has an HTTP recorder
- Includes HTML reports and graphs
- Support protocols like HTTP, XMPP, LDAP, etc.
It currently has 2.1k stars on GitHub.
Siege 
Siege is a command-line HTTP load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to help developers measure their code under stress.
- Supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols.
- Allows its users hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server “under siege.”
- Great for a simple, brute-force type of testing tool
It currently has 4k stars on GitHub.
Bees with Machine Guns 
Developed by the Chicago Tribune, this is probably the coolest-sounding performance testing tools on this list.
Bees with Machine Guns describes itself as a utility for arming (creating) many bees (micro Amazon EC2instances) to attack (load test) targets (web applications).
This tool can easily help you load test a site that needs to handle high traffic.
Leverage Amazon EC2
It currently has 6k stars on GitHub.
For enterprise-wide performance testing tools, LoadRunner tends to be one of the most common but many of these open-source tools can get you most of the functionality you need. Also, most of these tools protocols can be used for both performance testing web application and performance testing web services.
Fortio
Fortio is a cool load testing library, command-line tool, advanced echo server and web UI in go (golang).
This tool allows to specify a set query-per-second load and record latency histograms and other useful stats.
Pros
- It’s fast
- Small footprint (3Mb docker image, minimal dependencies)
- Reusable
- Embeddable go library
- Can tecord latency histograms and other useful stats.
It currently has 1.8k stars on GitHub.
puppeteer-webperf
With most modern applications using javascript heavy front-ends the needs for client-side performance measurements have never been greater.
Don’t ignore front-end performance.
You can use Puppeteer WebPerf to collect web performance stats like a trace for a page load, grab a dev tools trace with screenshots, get runtime performance metrics, and a bunch more.
Also, check out my complete front-end performance testing guide for more info.
It currently has 1.4k stars on GitHub.
Flood Element
Want to test real browser load?
Flood created this open-source solution to help specifically with mimicking user behaviors using real browser load testing.
Element is an open-source Playwright that uses a browser-based load testing tool.
Scripts are created using Typescript.
You can use it against your Web app in the same way that your customers do, opening a browser and interacting with page elements.
This approach can help find user-facing performance issues.
It’s written like a functional test script, but with the help of Flood, you can quickly run load testing scripts on as many nodes as you want in the Cloud.
One of the few open-source tools that allow you to create performance testing using real browsers to more closely mimic how real users interact with your application.
Read about it in my post Browser Level Performance Testing Using Element.
It currently has 204 stars on GitHub.
Artillery.io
Artillery.io is an open-source application with an opt-in of premium services to create load tests to simulate load to emulate thousands of users.
It has detailed performance metrics including:
- latency
- requests per second
- concurrency
- capture average response time
- and throughput.
Peak performance testing to handle maximum traffic for your back-end application for stability and reliability.
It has the ability to write custom logic, post, and pretest scenarios using JavaScript, which has a wide variety of NPM modules that you can use.
It supports multiple protocols, including HTTP, Web Socket, Socket.IO, Kinesis, and HLS.
It currently has 4,397 stars on GitHub.
Conclusion
Load testing your website, web applications or APIs is essential in order to guarantee the quality of your services. We have developed a wide network of tools, scripts and frameworks that will help you test performance under every possible circumstance.