If you haven’t heard of performance testing tools, don’t worry. You’re not alone. There are hundreds of open-source tools you can use to test your website load times. The problem is, figuring out which one is best for you can be overwhelming. With that being said, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some popular performance testing tools that are free to use.
Today, I’m going to be telling you about website load testing tools which are free. There are many websites out there that offer performance testing tools for a fee, but the following website load testing tools are completely free.
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
StresStimulus
StresStimulus targets application scenarios with other methods that are difficult to assess. Thanks to its autocorrelation, it automatically fixes replay errors. StresStimulus tracks and re-plays consumer behavior to reproduce patterns of variable use. It also tracks the load effect on the response and server architecture of the application. The result analyzer detects occult opponent defects that have not been seen by practical checks.
Characteristics:
- The End-to-End Research Wizard encompasses all measures from recording to web application performance testing.
- On-site or cloud testing with many load generators supported.
- Function as an autonomous platform or add-on for Fiddler
- Export script to the test format Visual Studio to support scenarios that fail when documented directly in Visual Studio
- Manual scripting is not mandatory but available; it supports three languages scripting.
LoadNinja
With the SmartBear LoadNinja, we can build advanced load tests without scripts easily, minimize test time by 50%, substitute load emulators with actual browsers, and gain actionable
browser-based metrics, all of them at a ninja pace. We can conveniently record customer-side conversations, debug in real-time, and quickly detect performance issues. LoadNinja allows teams with complex similarity, script translation, and script scrubbing to expand their test scope without losing efficiency.
Characteristics:
- Creation of Scriptless InstaPlay Load Test & Play
- Real execution of the load test browser
- VU Debugger – real-time debug tests
- The virtual user operation is handled in real-time by VU Inspector.
- No server computer & maintenance needed while hosting on the cloud
- Sophisticated analytical and reporting browser-based metrics
NeoLoad
NeoLoad is a groundbreaking tool for research, maintenance, and analysis for Agile and DevOps teams. NeoLoad combines output checks over the entire life cycle of continuous supply pipelines – spanning from modules to system-wide load tests.
Characteristics:
- Automated web application performance testing design, 10x faster than conventional methods for development and upgrade of tests
- Integration of automatic test runtime of CI servers
- Collaboration: shared test scripts and updates in real-time and following tests from an onsite or SaaS web interface
- Generation of hybrid onsite and cloud load from over 70 global locations
LoadView
With LoadView by Dotcom-Monitor, we can show your applications’ actual performance under load — just as our users experience it. LoadView uses the real website, Web applications, and API load checking dependent on browsers. Develop multi-stage screens that simulated users who use the web recorder of EveryStep to communicate with our website or program, or even manually edit the script using your very C# code.
Characteristics:
- Real browser cloud load testing
- Supports wealthy Internet applications like Flash, Silverlight, Java, HTML5, PHP, Ruby…
- Develop test scripts quickly and easily, without any code line
- Compatibility checking on 40+ mobile/desktop browsers and computers
- Amazon web services and Google Cloud Network have 13+ geographic cloud locations.
Grinder
Grinder is a free Java-based load testing framework which is available under open source license. The developer of this tool is Paco Gomez and it is maintained by Philip Aston. It has gone many improvements over the years. It is easy to run and create distributed testing solutions with the use of load injector machines. It consists of Grinder console and Grinder agents.
Features of Grinder
- TCP proxy
- Distributed testing that is scalable with agent instances
- Powered by Python or Closure with Java API
- It can support multiple protocols
- Flexible parameterization to create test data
- It enables post-processing and assertion and also access to test results for verification
Apache Jmeter
JMeter is an open-source platform to evaluate and calculate a range of resources using performance and load monitoring. It is one of the best charging research tools mainly used for web performance testing applications.
Characteristics:
- This free tool does not require state of the art charging testing infrastructure and supports a single controller’s multiple load injectors
- It is one of the highly versatile performance monitoring tools that completely supports all Java-based applications
- The user-friendly interface allows fewer scripting attempts compared to other API test tools
- The study of the main load associated with data and services utilizing monitors is adequate to include basic charts and graphs.
Gatling
Gatling is a stress tool which is built on Scala, Akka and Netty. It is one of the free and open source performance testing tools which is developed and maintained by Stephane Landelle. It consists of a basic GUI to test recorder. This tool consists of Domain-specific language which is easy to read and write tests development.
Features of Gatling
- Powerful and simple DSL
- Multi-threaded
- Extendable
- HTTP recorder
- Multiple input sources
- Understandable load reports
- Asynchronous and non-blocking approach
- Flexible validation assertions system
Tsung
Tsung is a non-Java-based open source tool to test the performance. It was previously known as IDX-Tsunami. It was launched by Nicolas Niclausse in 2001. It provides a complete testing solution with the help of protocols like web sockets, databases and authentication systems.
Features of Tsnug
- HTTP recorder
- HTML reports and graphs
- Distributed design
- Multiple protocol support.
- Able to monitor CPU of client, memory and network traffic
- Data-driven testing
- Flexible load scenarios
Locust
Locust is a Python-based framework which allows you to write scripts in Python language. This tool is very simple to use and you can monitor swarming process from web UI. It is targeted for web applications and web-based services. Using this framework you can test all sorts of performance tests. It has a different approach which is based on events and g-event co-routine. It stimulates many users and executes complex scenarios.
Features of Locust
- Web-based UI which is user-friendly
- Cross-platform
- Creation of test scenarios using Python language
- Scalable
- Easy API testing
- Web-based load monitoring
- Code based scripts
- Power assertion ability
Tauras
Tauras provide an automation friendly framework. You can involve in testing like functional testing and performance testing. You can write the tests in YAML which is readable, edible and simple approach to describe your tests in simple text file. Your team can also describe the tests in YAML or JSON file. It gives you relief from heavy client specific recorders and scripting tools.
Features of Tauras
- Provides abstraction layer
- Fits into your CI or CD pipeline
- Uses YAML which easy to perform code reviews
- Allows more members to contribute in testing
Conclusion:
It was only a matter of time until someone came out with a list of performance testing tools. So, I suppose I should be flattered that you found me. Hopefully, my post on the best Testing Tools is helpful to you as you find this type of information a bit daunting and overwhelming. It does not help that there are a lot of misleading articles out there.