15 BEST Performance Testing Tools (Load Testing Tools) in 2023

Latest Rankings: Detailed review and comparison of the top Performance and Load Testing Tools in 2023

Given below is a comprehensive list of the most widely used Performance Testing tools for measuring web application performance and load stress capacity. These load testing tools will ensure your application’s performance in peak traffic and under extreme stress conditions.

The list includes open source as well as licensed Performance Testing tools. But almost all licensed tools have a free trial version so that you can get a chance to work hands-on before deciding which is the best tool for your needs.

=> Click Here For Complete Performance Testing Tutorials Series

Top Performance Testing Tools

We have done the research for you. Here is a list of the best web application performance and load testing tools with a detailed comparison:

1. WebLOAD
2. LoadNinja
3. HeadSpin
4. ReadyAPI Performance
5. LoadView
6. Keysight’s Eggplant
7. Apache JMeter
8. LoadRunner
9. Rational Performance Tester
10. NeoLoad
11. LoadComplete
12. WAPT
13. Loadster
14. k6
15. Testing Anywhere
16. Appvance
17. StormForge

Here we go!

#1) WebLOAD

Enterprise-grade load and performance testing tool for web applications. WebLOAD is a tool of choice for enterprises with heavy user load and complex testing requirements. It allows you to perform load and stress testing on any internet application by generating load from the cloud and on-premises machines.

WebLOAD’s strengths are its flexibility and ease of use – enabling you to quickly define the tests you need with features like DOM-based recording/playback, automatic correlation, and JavaScript scripting language.

Further reading =>> How to run URL-based Load Test with WebLOAD

The tool provides a clear analysis of your web application performance, pinpointing issues and bottlenecks that may stand in the way of achieving your load and response requirements.

WebLOAD supports hundreds of technologies – from web protocols to enterprise applications and has built-in integration with Jenkins, Selenium and many other tools to enable continuous load testing for DevOps.

System Requirements: Windows, Linux

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#2) LoadNinja

LoadNinja by SmartBear allows you to quickly create scriptless sophisticated load tests, reduces testing time by 50%, replaces load emulators with real browsers, and get actionable, browser-based metrics, all at ninja speed.

You can easily capture client-side interactions, debug in real-time, and identify performance problems immediately. LoadNinja empowers teams to increase their test coverage without sacrificing quality by removing the tedious efforts of dynamic correlation, script translation, and script scrubbing.

With LoadNinja, engineers, testers and product teams can focus more on building apps that scale and focus less on building load testing scripts.

Features:

• Scriptless load test creation & playback with InstaPlay recorder.
• Real browser load test execution at scale.
• VU Debugger – debug tests in real-time.
• VU Inspector – manage virtual user activity in real-time.
• Hosted on the cloud, no server machine & upkeep required.
• Sophisticated browser-based metrics with analytics and reporting features.

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#3) HeadSpin

HeadSpin offers the industry’s best performance testing capabilities for its users. Users can optimize their digital experience with the performance testing capabilities of the HeadSpin Platform by identifying and resolving performance issues across applications, devices, and networks.

Features:

• Monitor and optimize performance across the entire user journey
• HeadSpin provides actual, real-world data removing ambiguity from thousands of devices, networks, and locations.
• Users can leverage advanced AI capabilities to automatically identify performance issues during testing before they impact users.

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#4) ReadyAPI Performance

SmartBear offers an all-in-one automated API Testing Platform called ReadyAPI. It contains various tools like Swagger & SwaggerHub, SoapUI NG, ReadyAPI Performance, Secure Pro, ServiceV, and AlertSite.

ReadyAPI Performance is an API tool for load testing. This API testing tool will assure you that your APIs can perform anywhere. It will let you install load agents on any server or cloud as well as on-premise. It provides advanced performance metrics for load test runs.

SoapUI NG is a tool for functional testing and you can use these functional testing use cases designed in the SOAPUI for performance testing.

This load testing tool will help you with testing the speed, scalability, and performance of the APIs, Servers, and Network Resources. It has features of flexible load generation, parallel API load tests, server monitoring, and pre-built load templates.

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#5) LoadView

LoadView is a fully managed, on-demand load testing tool that allows complete hassle-free load and stress testing.

Unlike many other load testing tools, LoadView performs testing in real browsers (not headless phantom browsers), which provides extremely accurate data, closely emulating real users. You only pay for what you use and no contracts are required. LoadView is 100% cloud-based, scalable, and can be deployed in minutes.

Advanced Load Testing Features include Point and Click Scripting, Global Cloud-Based Infrastructure, Real Browser Testing

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#6) Keysight’s Eggplant

Keysight’s Eggplant Software is an open, extensible, and multi-protocol performance testing solution. It is designed for new challenges. It performs end-to-end testing and can test anything and everything. It addresses technology glitches.

Eggplant Software provides the benefits of testing faster & efficiently, reducing IT costs, automating repetitive tasks, performing test maintenance at a scale, and reducing time-to-market.

Features:

• Eggplant is simple to use and can perform true, user-centric performance testing.
• It can simulate virtual users at application UI as well as network protocol levels. This feature provides a true understanding of the UX impact at scale.
• It performs intelligent test executions by auto-generating and auto-maintaining test assets.
• It has effective analysis and reporting capabilities.

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#7) Apache JMeter

Open source load testing tool: It is a Java platform application. It is mainly considered as a performance testing tool and it can also be integrated with the test plan. In addition to the load test plan, you can also create a functional test plan.

This tool has the capacity to be loaded into a server or network so as to check on its performance and analyze its working under different conditions. Initially, it was introduced to test web applications, but later its scope had widened.

It is of great use in testing the functional performance of resources such as Servlets, Perl Scripts and JAVA objects.  Need JVM 1.4 or higher to run.

System Requirements: It works under Unix and Windows OS

Official Website: Apache JMeter

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#8) Micro Focus LoadRunner

This is a Micro Focus product which can be used as a Performance Testing tool.  This can be bought as a Micro Focus product from its Micro Focus software division.  Also, it is very much useful in understanding and determining the performance and outcome of the system when there is an actual load.

One of the key attractive features of this testing tool is that it can create and handle thousands of users at the same time.

This tool enables you to gather all the required information with respect to the performance and is also based on the infrastructure.  LoadRunner comprises of different tools – namely, Virtual User Generator, Controller, Load Generator and Analysis.

System Requirements: Microsoft Windows and Linux are the favorable OS for this measuring tool.

Official Website: LoadRunner

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#9) Rational Performance Tester

Rational performance tester is an automated performance testing tool that can be used for a web application or a server-based application where the process of input and output is involved. This tool creates a demo of the original transaction process between the user and the web service.

By the end of it, all the statistical information is gathered and they are analyzed to increase efficiency. Any leakage on the website or the server can be identified and rectified immediately with the help of this tool.

This tool can be the best option for building an effective and error-free cloud computing service. This Rational Performance tester was developed by IBM (Rational software division). They have come up with many versions of this automated testing tool.

 System Requirement: Microsoft Windows and Linux AIX are good enough for this performance testing tool.

Official Website: Rational Performance Tester

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#10) NeoLoad

NeoLoad is the most automated performance testing platform for enterprise organizations that continuously test applications and APIs. NeoLoad provides testers and developers automatic test design and maintenance, the most realistic simulation of user behavior, fast root cause analysis, and built-in integrations with the entire SDLC toolchain.

NeoLoad lets you reuse and share test assets and results from functional testing tools to analytics and metrics from APM tools. NeoLoad supports a full range of mobile, web, and packaged applications, like SAP, to cover all testing needs.

Continuously schedule, manage and share test resources and results across the organization to ensure application performance.

System Requirements:  This tool is compatible with operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

Official Website: NeoLoad

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#11) LoadComplete

Easy and affordable performance testing tool. LoadComplete enables you to create and execute realistic load tests for websites and web apps. It automates creating realistic load tests by recording user interactions and simulating these actions with hundreds of virtual users either from your local computers or from the cloud.

LoadComplete helps you check your web server’s performance under a massive load, determine its robustness and estimate its scalability. It also provides detailed metrics and reports that help you gain in-depth insights into infrastructure performance, application behavior, and end-user experience.

System requirements: This tool works on 64-bit operating systems such as Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 or later.

Official Website: LoadComplete

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#12) WAPT

Performance Testing tool for websites and intranet applications: WAPT refers to the Web Application Performance tool.  These are the scales or analyzing tools for measuring the performance and output of any web application or web related interfaces.

These tools help us to measure the performance of any web services, web applications or any other web interfaces. With this tool, you have the advantage of testing the web application performance under different environments and different load conditions.

WAPT provides detailed information about virtual users and their output to its users during load testing. This is considered to be the most cost-effective tool for analyzing the performance of web services.

The WAPT tool can test the web application on its compatibility with the browser and operating system. It is also used for testing the compatibility with the windows application in certain cases.

WAPT System Requirement: Windows OS is required for this testing tool.

Official Website: WAPT

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#13) Loadster

Loadster is a desktop-based advanced HTTP load testing tool. The web browser can be used to record the scripts which are easy to use and record. Using the GUI you can modify the basic script with dynamic variables to validate the response.

With control over network bandwidth, you can simulate a large virtual user base for your application stress tests.

After the test, an executed HTML report is generated for analysis. This tool is the best way to identify the performance bottlenecks in your application.

Loadster System Requirements: Windows 7/Vista/XP

Official Website: Loadster

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#14) k6

k6 is a modern open-source load testing tool that provides an outstanding developer experience to test the performance of APIs and websites. It is a feature-rich and easy to use CLI tool with test cases written in ES5.1 JavaScript and support for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and WebSocket protocols.

“Like Unit testing, for Performance” – is the motto of k6. It provides native Pass/Fail behavior for easy automation and integration into CI pipelines. Additionally, the community has built a browser recorder and converters (JMeter, Postman, Swagger/OpenAPI) to facilitate the test creation process.

k6 runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Official Website: k6

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#15) Testing Anywhere

Testing Anywhere is an Automated testing tool that can be employed for testing the performance of any website, web application or any other objects. Many developers and testers make use of this tool to find out the bottlenecks in their web applications and rectify them accordingly.

It is a powerful tool that can test any application automatically. This testing tool comes along with a built-in editor which allows the users to edit the testing criteria according to their needs.

Testing Anywhere tool involves 5 simple steps to create a test. They are object recorder, advanced web recorder, SMART test recorder, Image recognition, and Editor with 385+ comments. This testing software was originally developed by San Jose-based Automation Anywhere Inc. Today, there are more than 25000 users for this product.

System Requirement:   This tool is compatible with all versions of Windows OS.

Official Website: Testing Anywhere

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#16) Appvance

The first unified software test automation platform, Appvance UTP eliminates the redundancies created by traditional siloed QA tools that clog DevOps teams.

By unifying tests with its advanced write-once methodology, a functional test can be re-used for performance, load, compatibility, app-penetration, synthetic APM and more, thereby increasing velocity and productivity, reducing costs and finally allowing teams to work and collaborate together.

Appvance UTP offers complete integration with Jenkins, Hudson, Rally, Bamboo & Jira, and also remains compatible with existing tools such as Selenium, JMeter, JUnit, Jython, and others. You can also pass data between applications and script types without any code needed.

Trial account: If you’re interested, you can sign up to “Test drive” the product and request a free demo on the website.

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#17) StormForge

StormForge offers fast and accurate enterprise-grade Performance-Testing-as-a-Service.

It is the only platform that combines performance testing with machine-learning powered optimization which allows users to both understand the performance and automatically identify the ideal configurations of the application for performance and resource utilization.

Use StormForge to load test your applications for performance and availability at scale before you release them to production. Create load tests in just three minutes and scale from tens to hundreds of thousands of requests per second, and even millions of concurrent users.

Easily create repeatable, automated load tests to incorporate into your CI/CD workflow. Capture actual production traffic to ensure that your load testing reflects actual traffic patterns.

Benefits:

• Shift performance is left to ensure performance and reliability before release.
• Improve user experience by ensuring application performance under load to meet SLAs and minimize business-impacting issues.
• Reduce risk and release with confidence by ensuring deployment success by testing with real-world scenarios before releasing new code into production.
• Build a culture of performance by empowering DevOps teams to build load testing into the CI/CD process to proactively ensure performance and reliability.
• Cut your cloud costs, cloud waste, lower your cloud bills, and improve your performance, guaranteed. StormForge guarantees a minimal reduction of Kubernetes cloud applications.

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#18) Apica LoadTest

Enterprise-Grade Application and Website Load Testing

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 offers flexible self-service and full-service load testing able to test 2M + concurrent users, through a network of 50+ locations around the world. Test on demand or automate testing throughout development lifecycles. Easily integrated into existing Dev stacks using their partnership integrations and their REST API.

Advanced Features include: AJAX/web services, XML/JSON Data Viewer, API data/Execution.

Official Website: Apica LoadTest

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#19) Predator

Open source load testing platform: Predator is the first tool of its kind, an end-to-end solution that manages the entire lifecycle of load testing APIs, from creating and managing existing performance tests to running these tests on a scheduled and on-demand basis, and finally viewing the test results in a highly informative and live, built-in report.

It has a simple, one-click installation, built with support for Kubernetes (helm charts), DC/OS (mesosphere universe), and Docker Engine, making it accessible for anyone and deployable in every machine that supports Docker.

Predator has no limit on the number of virtual users that can run a test, it supports running distributed load out of the box, enabling an unlimited amount of virtual users that can bombard your servers.

Unlike all other testing tools, Predator has a built-in DSL feature, thereby allowing developers to write functional and non-functional performance tests using their own business logic. Bootstrapped with a user-friendly UI alongside a simple REST API, Predator helps developers simplify their performance testing regime.

System Requirements: It works under every OS with Docker.

Official Website: Predator

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#20) QEngine (ManageEngine)

QEngine (ManageEngine) is the most common and easy-to-use automated testing tool that helps in performance testing and load testing of your web applications.

Many developers find it to be the most simple and easy tool to use for finding out any leakage in their web services or websites. The key important feature of this testing tool is its ability to perform remote testing of web services from any geographical location.

Other than that, QEngine (ManageEngine) also offers various other testing options such as Functional testing, compatibility testing, stress testing, load testing, and Regression testing. This automated testing tool has the capacity to generate and simulate a lot of users so that the performance can be well analyzed during the maximum load. This is a free software available for users online.

System Requirement:  This tool works with Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Official Website: QEngine

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Additional Tools

#21) Loadstorm

Cloud load testing for web applications: Loadstorm is the cheapest available performance and load testing tool. Here, you have the option of creating your own test plans, testing criteria and testing scenario. You can generate up to 50000 concurrent users by generating traffic to your website and then carry out the testing.

Through this tool, you can bring an end to all the expensive performance testing tools. The cloud infrastructure which is used in this tool enables you to send a huge amount of requests per second.

There are thousands of servers available around the world for this software. They are proudly known as the lowest cloud load testing tool. There is no need for any scripting knowledge for using this tool.

You will be provided with many graphs and reports which measure the performance of various metrics such as error rates, average response time and the number of users. This tool is available for free, but the premium account comes with some more added features.

System Requirement:  Windows OS.

Official Website: Loadstorm

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#22) CloudTest

SOASTA CloudTest is a performance testing tool for websites, mobile apps, APIs, and much more. Users and developers can use the cloud platform as their virtual testing lab. The developers can carry out their performance or load testing in the cloud platform in a cost-effective way.

CloudTest has the capacity to enable a number of users to use the website at the same time. It also increases the traffic of the website to know the actual performance under stress and heavy load.

The credit for developing this software goes to an American Technology company, SOASTA Inc. They provide many services for testing the websites and other web applications and now they also help in testing mobile applications.

They are not free services, the price differs according to the number of load injector machines required per hour by you. The trial version with the power of 100 concurrent users is available for free.

System Requirement: It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

Official Website: SOASTA CloudTest

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#23) Httperf

Httperf is a high-performance testing tool for measuring and analyzing the performance of any web service and web application. This is mainly used to test the HTTP servers and their performance.

The main objective of this testing tool would be to count the number of responses generated from this particular server. This generates HTTP GET requests from the server which helps in summarizing the overall performance of the server.

Through this tool, you will be able to conclude the rate at which the response is sent from each server and thereby the efficiency can be calculated. The ability to sustain server overload, support HTTP/1.1 protocol and compatibility with new workload are the three key features of this performance testing tool.

This was originally developed by David Mosberger and many others at HP. This is a Hewlett Packard product.

System Requirements: Windows and Linux.

Official Website: Httperf

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#24) OpenSTA

Open source HTTP performance test tool: Open STA stands for Open System Testing Architecture. This is a GUI-based performance tool used by application developers for load testing and analyzing. This is believed to be a complex tool among all the other performance testing tools.

It has proven its capabilities in the past and the current toolset is capable of performing heavy load testing and analysis for scripted HTTP and HTTPS. Here, testing is carried out using recordings and simple scripts.

To carry out the test successfully, results and other statistics are taken through various test runs. The data and results can be later exported to the software for creating reports. This is a free testing tool and it will be distributed under GNU GPL and it will remain free forever. This tool was originally developed by Cyrano, which was later taken over by Quotium.

System Requirement: OpenSTA runs only on the Windows operating system.

Official Website: OpenSTA

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#25) SmartMeter.io

This load and performance testing tool provides advanced testing functions. With JMeter at its core, it will be instantly familiar to any of its users.

Creating a test on SmartMeter.io is very simple. You can make test scenarios without scripting just by clicking on an embedded browser. There’s also no proxy setup or browser plugin necessary.

It features automatically generated reports with all details about the test and its results. The results contain auto-evaluated acceptance criteria, statistics, graph comparison tool, and trend analysis of multiple test runs.

The tool is also strong in distributed testing, CI integration, and offers unparalleled performance testing support for Vaadin apps.

System Requirements: Windows, Linux, and Mac OS

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Conclusion

Hope this comprehensive post with the list of the best Performance and Load testing tools will be useful for selecting the best tool for your project.

The smartest way is to try the relevant tools using the trial versions to see how best it fits for your requirements.