Performance testing is a very important part in the delivery process or any software development life cycle. When it comes to the mobile application performance testing, there are numerous tools available in the market which can make your life easy when it comes to instrumenting your app, connecting your app to the cloud for performance tests and more.
In this article, I will tell you about open source performance testing tools which are less known, but have some interesting approaches, are free or are available on a trial basis.
WebLOAD
This is an enterprise-scale load testing tool that can generate real-life and reliable load scenarios, even in most complex systems. Its smart analytics provide in-depth performance insights. The tool comes with built-in support for hundreds of technologies. It also integrates with several tools to support simpler monitoring.
The key features of this performance testing tool are as follows:
- It is available on the Cloud or as an on-premise deployment
- Readily extensible and supports all the major web technologies
- Creates a flexible test environment
- Native JavaScript based on smart scripting with validation engines, parameterization, and powerful correlation
- Detects bottlenecks automatically
WebLOAD is widely used by performance testing services with complex and heavy user load requirements. You can conduct stress and load testing on any web-based software by creating load from on-premise systems and the Cloud. It supports technologies including enterprise applications to web protocols. It supports integration with tools like Selenium, Jenkins, and many others to allow continuous load testing for DevOps.
2. LoadNinja
LoadNinja allows you to build scriptless load tests. It is preferred by performance testing services because it helps reduce testing times by half. Other advantages include replacing load emulators with real browsers and generating actionable metrics.
This tool allows you to debug in the real-time, record client-side interactions, identify performance issues instantly, and do much more. LoadNinja allows you to boost your testing coverage without compromising on quality. It removes cumbersome, repetitive tasks involved in script translation, dynamic correlation, and script scrubbing. It allows you to spend more time in developing scalable applications and less time on creating load testing scripts.
The key features of LoadNinja are as follows:
- Real browser load testing at scale
- Create a scriptless load test and playback feature
- Real-time management of virtual user activity
- Real-time test debugging
- Advanced browser-based metrics with reporting and analytics features
- Cloud-based hosting eliminates maintenance of the server
LoadNinja supports the following protocols:
- HTTPS
- HTTP
- Java-based protocol
- SAP GUI Web
- Google Web Toolkit
- WebSocket
- Oracle Forms
3. LoadView
LoadView is also widely popular with performance testing services. This is an on-demand and fully-managed load testing and stress testing tool. It is different from most other load testing tools in that testing is conducted in real browsers. The result is close emulation of real users and highly accurate data. It is fully cloud-based and is readily deployed in minutes. It allows creating multi-step scripts simulating user interaction with your application or website.
Some of the key features of LoadView are as follows:
- Supports advanced load testing features like global Cloud-based infrastructure, point and click scripting, and real browser testing
- Allows instant and easy creation of test scripts without the need for coding
- Supports Rich Internet Applications including Java, Flash, HTML5, Ruby, Silverlight, and PHMP among others
- Over a dozen global Cloud locations supported by Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services
- Test compatibility with dozens of desktop and mobile devices and browsers
- Easy to share performance metrics and reports
- Identifies bottlenecks and supports scalability
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.
7. 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.
8. LoadView
Empower your IT team to perform stress testing on your websites, APIs, and web applications with thousands of connections concurrently in actual browsers using the enterprise-level platform of LoadView.
LoadView leverages AWS and Azure to manage its cloud network so you can design multiple tests, even on complex apps. You can define users, duration, and behavior using various scenarios and simulate users virtually with load injectors from 30 global locations across the US, South America, Canada, APAC, and Europe.
The tool offers three load curves, Load Step curve, Dynamic Adjustable curve, and Goal-based curve, to check traffic spikes, scalability, and infrastructure limits.
Features and Benefits
- Advanced firewall: Run tests behind a firewall as LoadView offers dedicated IPs that you can allow and configure.
- Video recording: Capture website or app rendering with video recording for better analysis and review.
- Other features: Reference servers, detailed waterfall charts, dynamic variables, and load injector controls.
- Pricing: Starts at $199/month for 1000 concurrent users.
9. NeoLoad
NeoLoad is a continuous performance testing tool to automate your application and API load testing. It provides intuitive design and maintenance of tests and offers realistic user behavior simulation.
It simplifies test creations with conditions, loops, and drag-and-drop controls with a robust codeless design. For advanced cases, you can use JavaScript. It uses a YAML-based format that is human readable and domain-specific.
NeoLoad also provides you with detailed reports after test completion, allows you to perform infrastructure monitoring, and you can also integrate APM to get better analysis and validate builds with automatic SLAs.
Features and Benefits
- Supported technologies: It supports web frameworks and protocols like HTML, Angular, HTTP/2, WebSocket, etc.; packaged apps like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, IBM, etc.
- Advanced correlation: Correlates dynamic parameters with automatic handling and detects app-specific parameters along with predefined rules like .Net, Siebel, JSF, etc.
- Integration: Integrates with DevOps tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, Git, etc.; SOAP/REST support, Selenium, Tricentis Tosca, Dynatrace, Azure, Jenkins, Git, etc.
- Pricing: Contact them for a customized plan.
10. 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.
11. Silk Performer
Conduct powerful and realistic stress and load testing using Silk Performer for your mobile, web, and enterprise apps. It pinpoints issue causes and location and ensures that server and application uptimes during peak traffic.
Provide better user experience with design scripts that help uncover issues and use end-to-end diagnostics to detect, monitor, resolve, and isolate problems. It features customizable reports so you can generate graphs and reports and customize them based on your preference.
With Cloud scalability, you can simulate peak-load of any size effortlessly and test faster by reusing existing performance tests and run them in different scenarios without changing scripts.
Silk Performer has three components, namely, Performance Explorer, True Log Explorer, and Workbench. It offers built-in VPNs that allow you to test and resolve internet-based apps under heavy loads.
Other essential capabilities of Silk Performer include user-friendly parameterization and correlation, Agent Health Control, resource management, integrated server monitoring, version controls, and more.
Micro Focus also offers another project-based load and performance testing tool called LoadRunner. It tests applications and measures system performance and behavior under load. Simulating thousands of concurrent users, you can record and analyze application performance.
Features and Benefits
- Supported protocols: HTTPS, HTTP, HTML, SMTP, POP, TCP, IP, FTP, .NET, SOAP, XML, LDAP, and more.
- Global locations: Execute tests out of more than 50 international locations.
- Supported technologies: Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AWS.
- Pricing: Contact them for a quote. A free trial is also available.
12. AppLoader
AppLoader by Automai is an automated performance tool without coding or installations on your app servers/VDI. This frontend tool lets you view actual app performance using bots that access your apps en masse using their desktop GUI.
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AppLoader frees you from protocol limitations and lets you test things you want. Create custom workflows with ease using canned scripts and log-in time and define workflows to fit your workload.
You can perform testing by building automated test cases in a minute, using the code-free scripts generated by the tool, playback and view the bot navigating the process, and then adding or editing logic to your cases anytime. The test processes involve multiple apps through access points, and you require no plugins or APIs.
View screenshots quickly when the test fails to detect the cause and resolve the issues. Plus, you can also see the overall performance metrics and ramp-up times in a single dashboard.
AppLoader offers easy maintenance, and you can reuse its existing components, sections, and scenarios; retake images, edit line actions if needed, and change script sections to meet application changes and upgrades.
Features and Benefits
- Robotic automation: With robotic automation for testing, you don’t have to install anything over your app servers or VDIs.
- User-friendly test scenarios: View scenario components at one glance and find actions, define transactions anytime, and more.
- Pricing: Tell them your requirements to get a quote. A free trial is available, along with a demo.
13. Gatling
Launched in 2012 and written in Scala, Gatling is an open source performance and load testing tool for web services, mainly applications. It lets you avoid crashes by anticipating crashes and slow response times, detect issues early to improve time to market, enhance user experience, and boost your business.
The code-link scripts of Gatling let you maintain test scenarios easily and automate them. It is built for continuous load tests and can integrate easily with your developmental pipeline. It also includes a web recorder.
Features and Benefits
- Readable DSL: Their domain-specific language (DSL) makes the reading of test scenarios easy for everyone.
- Analysis: Simulate thousands of user requests/second easily and achieve highly accurate metrics that you can view in a colorful and dynamic report.
- Pricing: Free.
Apart from an open source tool, Gatling also offers a commercial tool Gatling Frontline with advanced features and metrics for test automation and integration. Its on-premise plan costs $485/month, while the cloud plan starts from $3/hour
14. BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter is an enterprise-ready load testing tool founded in 2011 that allows you to perform shift testing. It was awarded Gartner peer insights Customers’ Choice 2020 for Software Test Automation.
Its intuitive UI allows you to create load tests or reuse existing scripts to run them within your continuous testing pipelines. You can simulate thousands of virtual users out of 56 global locations by leveraging their open source toolchain. In addition, you can also control arrival rates, hits/sec, and threads in real-time.
BlazeMeter provides you with detailed reports to view historical trends and improve your software performance. You get mock services to visualize your entire system, simulate slow network latency and slow responses to ensure software performance and quality.
Features and Benefits
- 360-degree API testing: Monitor APIs quickly with clarity on code health to ensure API call content and structure return data as expected.
- Integration: Integrates with Apache JMeter, Taurus, Gatling, Selenium, and more.
- Pricing: There’s a free plan available for 50 concurrent users and ten tests, while paid plans start at 99/month for 1000 simultaneous users and 200 tests/year.
Conclusion
Performance is a critical element in the success of a mobile app. With a growing number of users, any application can’t afford to compromise on performance. Deliver high-end performance on all your app’s screens like splash page, landing page, search results page, or on-boarding screens. Testing mobile applications on various devices make the testing thorough and comprehensive; especially when it comes to cross platform compatibility.