There are many tools that help you to check the performance of your website or web app. You can even get paid for it! This makes it easy to know if your website is performing well enough for people to use it. It depends on what metrics you use to check how well it performs.
When it comes to testing the performance of your web servers, testing tools are available in different types. This article lists down some of the load testing tools which are available for free. The list includes performance testing tools which can be accessed through site itself, browser extensions, desktop applications and API based tools.
SoapUI Pro
SoapUI Pro is a very popular and most powerful testing tool for SOAP web services functional testing as well as REST API functional testing. It provides complete API Test Automation Framework for SOAP and REST.
Tool Highlights:
- World’s leading tool for REST & SOAP web service testing
- Easy to use GUI, with features like point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and pre-built security scans
- Quick creation and execution of automated tests – functional, regression, load, and security
- Powerful data-driven testing allows you to use external data sources to keep your tests more maintainable
- Provides end to end test coverage under a single test environment
- Easily reuse functional tests as load tests in LoadUI Pro
- Built on the same foundation as the award-winning SoapUI open source
- Supports all protocols and standards
Source code: SoapUI Pro has both open source and licensed version.
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is an all-in-one automation tool that has simplified API and web testing for over 850,000 teams and businesses.
Also extending capabilities to help scale mobile and desktop testing, some of it key features are:
- A friendly UI and simple test creation with record & playback, built-in keywords, pre-defined project templates.
- Easy tests migration from SoapUI, Postman and WSDL.
- Handles REST, SOAP/1.1 and SOAP/1.2 requests.
- Support self-healing mechanism, data-driven testing, page-object model pattern and BDD to ease maintenance efforts.
- Maximize test reusability with shared capabilities and test objects across projects.
- Generate reports with insightful graphs of essential metrics and real-time notifications after each execution (Slack, Git& Microsoft Teams).
Swagger.io
Price: There are three plans for Swagger Hub, Free, Team, and Enterprise.
The price for the Team plan is $30 per month, for two users. For this plan, you can select the number of users as 2, 5, 10, 15, and 20. The price will increase as the number of users go up.
The third plan is an Enterprise plan. Enterprise plan is for 25 or more number of users. Contact the company to know more about this company.
The Swagger is a tool that will help you through the entire lifecycle of an API. This tool will allow doing a functional, performance, and security testing of API.
Swagger Inspector helps the developers and QAs to manually validate and explore the APIs in the cloud. Load and performance testing is performed through LoadUI Pro. It will allow you to reuse the functional tests of SoapUI. Swagger provides many open source tools.
Features:
Swagger provides the following features related to API:
- API design and development
- API documentation
- API Testing
- API Mocking and Virtualizations
- API Governance and monitoring
Best For: Tool is best for API designing.
JMeter
Price: Free
It is open-source software for load and performance testing of applications. It supports cross-platform. Jmeter works at a protocol layer.
Developers can use this tool as a unit-test tool for the testing of JDBC database connections. It has plugins based architecture. Jmeter can generate test data. It supports Command-line mode, which will be helpful for Java-compatible OS.
Features:
- It will allow you to use various programming languages.
- Load and performance testing of many different applications, servers, and protocols.
- It allows you to replay test results.
- It provides support for variable parameterization and assertions.
- It supports per-thread cookies.
- Configuration variables and a variety of reports are also supported by Jmeter.
Best For: Tool is best for load and performance testing of web applications.
Airborne
Price: Free
Airborne is an open-source API test automation framework. It is a Ruby-based RSpec driven framework. This tool doesn’t have UI. It just provides the text file to write the code.
Features:
- It can work with APIs which are written in Rails.
- To use this tool, you must know Ruby and RSpec fundamentals.
- It can work with Rack applications.
Pyresttest
Price: You can donate the amount by creating an account on GitHub.
It is a python based tool for testing of RESTful APIs. It is also a Micro-benchmarking tool. For tests, it supports JSON config files. The tool is extensible in Python.
Features:
- Return exit codes for failed results.
- The building of test scenarios with generate/extract/validates mechanisms.
- Because of minimal dependencies, it has easy deployment on the server which is helpful for smoke testing.
- No code required.
Best For RESTful APIs.
Apigee
Price: Apigee provides four pricing plans, Evaluation (Free), Team ($500 per month), Business ($2500 per month), Enterprise (Contact them). A free trial is also available for the tool.
Apigee is a cross-cloud API management platform.
It provides security and governance policies for all APIs. Using the open API specification, the tool allows you to easily create API proxies. With this tool, you can design, secure, analyze, and scale APIs anywhere.
Features:
- It provides customizable developer portal.
- It supports Node.js.
- With the Enterprise plan, you will get advanced features like Apigee Sense advanced security, distributed network for low latency, Monetization for new business models, and traffic isolation.
- With a Business plan, it provides the features of IP whitelisting, Java & Python callouts, distributed traffic management.
- For the Team plan, it provides API analytics, Web service callouts, and some advanced policies like security, mediation, and protocol.
Best For API development.
Karate DSL
Price: Free
It is an open-source framework for API testing. Karate framework is based on the cucumber library. With this tool, a tester can test web services by writing tests in a domain-specific language.
This tool is specially designed for automated API testing and is released by Intuit. To use this tool there is no need to have a programming language. But the basic understanding of HTTP, JSON, XML, XPath, and JsonPath will be an added advantage.
Features:
- Multi-threaded parallel execution is supported.
- It allows configuration switching.
- Reports generation.
- It supports reusing Payload-data for API testing.
Best For: It allows you to write tests in any language which can deal with HTTP, JSON, or XML.
TestMaker
Testmaker supports Web Service testing for SOAP and REST services.
Tool Highlights:
- A single test script can be put as an answer to functional, load & performance testing as well as production monitors.
- Surfaces performance & functional issues in web services
- Works on push to test methodology
- Offers easy migration
- Tests can be executed on grid and cloud.
Conclusion:
Load/performance testing is an often-misunderstood, key phase in software development. It might be a bit of a mystery at first, but there’s a lot to gain from its implementation. Performance testing tools can help you increase your peace of mind and the efficiency of your applications.