Performance Testing Tools for Mobile Native Applications

Are you testing for the best mobile search performance? If the answer to this is no, it’s time to change that. Testing for performance on your mobile native application is crucial for your marketing success. Implementing performance monitoring tools allows marketers to accomplish excellent performance monitoring and tracking. This does however not mean it is easy to find the best tools as there are many options in the market today that can be tricky to choose between. On this post, I will tell you about 10 of my favorite performance testing tools for mobile native applications. I’ve got a plugin recommendation and where they perform best (You’ll like this).

The importance of performance testing your website or web application has been recognized globally. However, that’s not the case with native mobile applications and mobile websites. Performance testing of native mobile apps hasn’t seen much attention, perhaps due to a view that it is too difficult and specialized, or perhaps due to limited tooling.

Top load testing tools for mobile applications

WebLOAD

top load testing tools for mobile applications - webload

WebLOAD is one of the top tools to help you handle performance testing your systems. While normally for web platforms, WebLOAD integrates with Perfecto Mobile and lets you run realistic mobile performance testing to accurately evaluate the mobile user experience while the system is presented with load conditions. You can measure the response time and availability of key transactions inside a mobile application under simulated real-world conditions including backend server load, network conditions and specific mobile device.

Pricing: Pricing is undisclosed but there is a free trial available to test out the product.

LoadUI Pro

top load testing tools for mobile applications - load ui ng pro

LoadUI Pro lets you conduct rapid and comprehensive performance testing for SOAP and REST APIs. Altering test speed and scalability of new changes to APIs can be done in minutes, as well as preview API performance behaviors before releasing to production environments.

Pricing: Pricing starts at €5,327/year and includes a free trial.

Apica LoadTest

top load testing tools for mobile applications - apica load test

Apica LoadTest is designed to help enterprises ensure the scalability of websites, apps, APIs and IoT. By load testing application performance your team can find performance bottlenecks before they become huge issues during traffic spikes.

Pricing: There is no information on the price but you can schedule a demo with the team.

CloudTest

top load testing tools for mobile applications - cloudtest

CloudTest lets you stress test your app’s environment to ensure that you’re ready for any sudden spikes in traffic. Their team of engineers can help you design your test at any scale or stage of production and interpret the results. You’ll see what the performance problems are and where they originate, so you can fix them before they affect customers.

Pricing: There is no information on the price but you can schedule a demo with the team.

LoadRunner

top load testing tools for mobile applications - loadrunner

LoadRunner supports a wide range of apps. It helps you drastically reduce the amount of time and skill required to simulate user transactions in load testing software. And with integrations with a lot of different IDEs and support for testing scripts it allows for continuous testing. LoadRunner also helps you identify performance bottlenecks by using seamless integrated real-time performance monitors.

Pricing: Pricing is dependent on virtual users. With a free version for up to 50 virtual users and there is an option of $1.40 per virtual user day.

WAPT

top load testing tools for mobile applications - wapt

WAPT doesn’t need a whole lot of QA experience and wide technical background to start running test loading scripts. At the same time, it provides the functionality sufficient to test mobile applications and any server component accessible over HTTP. There is also the option of WAPT Pro that offers a higher scale and more integrations and features.

Pricing: Starts at $700 for WAPT and $1200 for WAPT Pro.

NeoLoad

top load testing tools for mobile applications - neoload

NeoLoad is a great straight out of the box option for mobile load testing and even for IoT use cases. You can quickly and efficiently create tests that accurately represent your real users regarding network conditions, specific devices, and geographic locations. You will be able to record any native or otherwise mobile app direct recording from any device or emulator.

Pricing: Starts at a free version and there are three more paid packages depending on the number of virtual users.

Learn more:

Instabug empowers mobile teams to accelerate their workflows and release with confidence through Real-Time Contextual Insights across the entire app lifecycle.

1. Akamai CloudTest

CloudTest is an integrated load testing tool which provides website verification and mobile app performance through user-based testing. It’s a useful performance testing solution for businesses of all sizes that helps with global load assessment, simulation of large events, precision control, visual test creation, customizable dashboards, & more.

Highlighted Features

  • Shift-left testing: Plug into continuous integration (CI) tools for automated “shift-left” testing
  • Elastic, Globally Distributed Environment: Accurately test your infrastructure with geographically dispersed loads. Its Global Test Cloud generates realistic production volume from locations that represent your actual user base.
  • Visual Test Creation: Object-based scripting allows you to insert conditionals and loops; nest actions; set parameters, variables, and validations; and reuse and combine tests — all without code.
  • Visual Playback Editor: Drag and drop test cases into tracks to be executed on various cloud or on-premise locations. Configure virtual users, geographic origin, repeats, ramp-ups, and pacing with just a few clicks.
  • Customizable Dashboards: Use built-in dashboards, or quickly customize your own using a drag-and-drop interface to see what’s important to you. Merge analytics, including third-party data from monitoring tools, for a single view of performance.

Pricing

Paid plan only. Contact vendor for pricing.

2. Apica LoadTest

Test the scalability of all your applications, identify performance bottlenecks, and deliver remarkable customer experiences that transcend the ever-growing expectations of your end-users. Apica LoadTest supports a wide range of applications and devices — from legacy apps, e-commerce sites, and video streaming to mobile apps and IoT.

Highlighted Features

  • Simulate real-world user behavior: from around the world, including mainland China, and test high-traffic applications with confidence using a website stress test.
  • Advanced scripting tool: Easily create scripts for complex app load testing scenarios with the scripting tool without writing any code. Build scripts for any device by record/replay or enter transactions manually.
  • Troubleshooting: Discover how your application responds to various loads with a load test and identify performance bottlenecks before they cause damage in production. Compare every release against benchmarks and ensure your digital service stands up to your scalability requirements.
  • Integrations: Integrates out-of-the-box with several technologies, offering a very high degree of flexibility. It offers native integration with New Relic and AppDynamics

Pricing

Apica LoadTest offers a free trial. Contact vendor for pricing.

3. Apptim

Apptim empowers mobile developers, testers, and managers to easily test their native apps and analyze client-side performance to prevent any critical issues from going live. Measure app render times, power consumption, resource usage, capture crashes, and more on Android and iOS devices.

Highlighted Features

  • Native App Testing: Apptim evaluates the performance of native Android and iOS mobile apps while running them on real devices.
  • Performance and Bug Reports: After each test session, the tool generates a report with the performance metrics and bugs that you may find during your test session with Apptim.
  • JIRA Integration: Publish and track bugs directly in this project management tool.
  • Easy to Use: Apptim’s user interface is elegant and intuitive, making it a simple tool to use. Also, on the website, you can find detailed documentation that will help you through your first steps with the tool and you have support available every step of the way.
  • Compare Two Test Sessions: If you repeat a test for a particular feature once a new version of your app is ready, you can compare the results to see if there are any big differences in the performance.
  • Supports Appium Test Automation: Run your Appium tests and capture performance metrics while using Apptim and integrate with any CI server.

Pricing

Apptim has free and paid plans that also come with free trials.
Download Apptim for free here.

4. BlazeMeter

BlazeMeter provides performance and load testing as a service, and it now offers a brand new, complete Continuous Testing Platform to help enterprises shift-left. BlazeMeter provides a web-based interface for creating static load tests and can run any JMeter script for dynamic load tests. One of BlazeMeter’s main strengths is that it supplements JMeter (the top open-source load testing app) with “Enterprise” features such as distributed testing, real-time reporting, integration with developer tools for continuous integration (CI), and application performance monitoring (APM).

Highlighted Features

  • 100% Compatible with Apache JMeter
  • Create tests on any scale — up to 1 million concurrent users
  • Set up tests within minutes
  • Run scriptless tests or upload URL lists
  • Run from the cloud or on-premise
  • Run tests from multiple geo-locations
  • Simulate mobile testing from real devices
  • Facilitates team collaboration with script and report sharing
  • Multi-tool support
  • Integrations with leading CI and APM tools
  • Desktop and mobile user experience monitoring

Pricing

BlazeMeter has free and paid plans with a free trial.

5. Eggplant

Eggplant is a testing solution that enables large businesses and test automation specialists to test any platform, application, or website through automated AI, machine learning & DevOps. Eggplant Performance provides sophisticated performance and load testing tools that can test the widest range of technology and can scale up to simulate any load you need but are still easy-to-use.

Highlighted Features

  • Easy script generation: Eggplant Performance provides sophisticated protocol recording and data correlation to automatically generate user scripts.
  • Broad technical coverage and customizable virtual users: Eggplant Performance has deep support for testing apps, but it also has in-built support for other common client-server technologies.
  • Scalable and distributable: Eggplant Performance allows testers to partition virtual users any way they like across injectors. This means you can scale to any amount of users and from any location.

Pricing

Eggplant offers a paid subscription plan and a free trial.

6. Experitest

Experitest is a leading provider of quality assurance tools for mobile DevOps, including manual testing, performance testing, load testing, and monitoring for mobile applications. Experitest tools support all mobile OS, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. All of our SaaS tools integrate into every ALM environment, UFT/QTP, WebDriver/Selenium, Junit, Microsoft Visual Studio, and Python.

Highlighted Features

  • Add Mobile and Web Performance Testing to Your Test Automation Suite: Integrate into your CI/CD pipeline with standard automated Appium & Selenium tests.
  • Integrate User Performance Metrics Into Manual and Automated Testing: Evaluate how responsive and effective an application is to the end-user under various network conditions, from different locations around the globe and on different devices, OS and browsers.
  • Measure Performance Data: Transaction duration, Speed Index, CPU consumption, Memory Consumption, Battery Consumption, Network data (upload and download)
  • Identify Performance Bottlenecks in Mobile and Web Tests: Reports with deep network and test data enable rapid root cause analysis including video reports of test actions and HAR (HTTP Archive) file downloads.

Pricing

Experitest offers free to enterprise plans.

7. Gatling

Gatling is an open-source load and performance testing framework based on Scala, Akka, and Netty. The software is designed to be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications, but can also be used for mobile. Designed to facilitate continuous testing, it integrates with your build tool and offers a web recorder and colorful reports.

Highlighted Features

  • Standalone HTTP Proxy Recorder
  • Scala-based scripting
  • An expressive self-explanatory DSL for test development
  • Asynchronous non-blocking engine for maximum performance
  • Support of HTTP(S) protocols and can also be used for JDBC and JMS load testing
  • Validations and assertions
  • Comprehensive HTML Report

Pricing

Gatling is free and open-source. Its creators also developed a paid, enterprise solution called Gatling Frontline.

8. HeadSpin

HeadSpin is a Digital Experience AI Platform that combines a global device infrastructure, test automation, and ML-driven performance and quality of experience analytics. HeadSpin empowers engineering, QA, operations, and product teams to assure optimal digital experiences across all delivery channels throughout the development lifecycle.

Highlighted Features

  • Monitor and optimize performance: Continuously monitor and analyze QoE across applications, devices, and 3rd-party interfaces for full visibility to the real user experience.
  • Performance data from real-world conditions: Provides actual real-world data from all the various devices, networks, and locations.
  • Performance issue detection: Leverage advanced AI capabilities to automatically identify performance issues in testing before they impact users.
  • Digital Lifecycle KPIs: Metrics and events from HeadSpin and 3rd party sources combine to provide insights and understanding throughout the digital experience lifecycle, from planning to development to operations.

Pricing

HeadSpin does not offer a free plan. Contact the vendor for pricing.

9. JMeter

The industry standard in open source load testing tools, Apache JMeter is a 100% java based application with a graphical interface. It is designed to analyze and measure the performance and load functional behavior of web applications and a variety of services. JMeter allows you to perform various testing activities like performance, load, stress, regression, and functional testing, to get accurate performance metrics against your web server. JMeter can be used to measure the performance of the mobile application in which it will record the request through a proxy. A proxy can be configured in an iPhone or Android device and the request will be captured by JMeter for further analysis.

Highlighted Features

  • User-friendly GUI: JMeter comes with a simple and interactive GUI
  • Platform independent: JMeter is written and developed using java, so it can run on any environment or workstation that accepts a Java virtual machine, for example — Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
  • Supports various server types: Web (HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP), database (JDBC, LDAP, JMS), and mail (POP3)
  • Supports multiple protocols: HTTP, JDBC, LDAP, SOAP, JMS, and FTP
  • Simulate multiple users: JMeter simulates multiple users by using virtual users or unique users to generate heavy load against a mobile application under test
  • Multi-threading framework: Allows concurrent and simultaneous sampling of different functions by many or separate thread groups
  • Remote distributed testing: JMeter uses a Master-Slave concept for distributed testing where the master will distribute tests among all the slaves and the slaves will execute scripts against your server
  • Reporting: Test results can be viewed in different formats like graphs, tables, trees, and report,s etc.

Pricing

JMeter is free (open source).

10. Neoload

NeoLoad comes out-of-the-box with all the capabilities teams need to create the most realistic mobile load testing — even for IoT use cases. You can quickly and efficiently create tests that accurately represent your real users regarding network conditions, specific devices, and geographic locations.

Highlighted Features

  • Record any mobile app: Directly record native, hybrid, and mobile browser apps from any device or emulator
  • Validate performance under realistic network conditions: Network virtualization for bandwidth, latency and packet loss; Predefined pickers for signal strengths and network types
  • Simulate any mobile device or browser: Use simulated devices and browsers for realistic response times and load with predefined or custom settings for most popular devices
  • Test on real devices and browsers under load: Complete end-user experience from real mobile and IoT devices and browsers. Capture rendering times, CPU, battery, memory, and more
  • Integrations: Use with Perfecto, Appium, Selenium, and more
  • Create geographic realism from the cloud: It gives you the option to use all major cloud providers in one platform with the ability to distributed tests geographically from outside the firewall

Pricing

Neoload offers a free trial and two paid plans. Contact vendor for pricing.

Mobile Performance Is Good UX

If you’re looking to improve the quality of your mobile app, any of the above mobile performance testing tools will be of great help. It’s important to take several factors into account before getting started with your mobile performance testing strategy:

  • Type of app
  • Network conditions
  • Virtual users, real users; distributed load
  • Device-level (client-side) performance testing
  • Server-side performance testing
  • Load conditions and types of testing
  • Test data and business-critical scenarios
  • Device availability (physical or cloud-hosted)

For more information on how to test mobile app performance, see this explanatory article that breaks down different metrics, types of mobile performance tests, and tools needed for each!Topics: MOBILE TESTING, PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING, PERFORMANCE TESTING, CLIENT SIDE PERFORMANCE, MOBILE PERFORMANCE, TESTING A MOBILE APPLICATION, SOFTWARE QA, MOBILE APPS, PERFORMANCE

Published at DZone with permission of Kalei White. See the original article here. 

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COnclusion

If you would like to know how one of these tools is acting on a mobile web page, you may use the following instructions. If a performance test tool doesn’t have an application specifically designed for mobile, you can use screen capture software to take a snapshot of your device’s browser window. All performance testing tools provide guides on how to set up each type of browser/device you want to test.

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