In the world of software development, testing is vital. No matter how well you code or how thorough your initial testing process may be, there’s always a chance that something will slip through the cracks.
That’s why load testing is so important. And while plenty of commercial tools out there can help you with this process, open-source load testing software is also available
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- The importance of load testing
- Top open-source and FREE performance load testing tools for your load and stress testing performance engineering efforts
- Some key features of each load testing software
What is load testing?
Load testing is a specific sub-family of a performance test that includes many concurrent users running the same program at the same time. This is done to see whether a system infrastructure can handle the load without compromising functionality or just with acceptable performance degradation.
Load testing is used to help determine if:
- The response time returned from critical actions in your application is acceptable compared to specification, user requirements, or KPI.
- Are your key business functionality behaving properly under heavy load
- Is your infrastructure designed to scale under stress tests
Load Testing vs. Other Test
Load testing vs. other tests is one of the most misunderstood parts of performance testing. And there are many load testing best practices you should be aware of before even using one of the tools listed below.
Here is our comprehensive list of the top open-source and FREE load testing tools you can use this 2023 for your load and stress testing performance engineering efforts.
Below are some of the best load testing tools that include a tool comparison to help you decide on which one is right for your application performance efforts in 2023.
The Top Load Testing Tools List for 2023
This list only includes open source and free options for the top load testing tools for automated performance testing and API load tests, so you can just download and get started right away without spending a dime.
- Front-end performance testing measures how fast your website loads and displays content for users. In contrast, back-end performance testing involves sending multiple requests to your servers to see if they can handle simultaneous requests. Most performance testing tools only test API endpoints, but tools like xk6-browser go beyond that by testing browser performance as well.
- Performance testing tools, in general, are critical to customer satisfaction. They will move on to your competitor if your application performance doesn’t meet your customer’s expectations or all service level agreements.
JMeter
JMeter is the most popular open-source tool in the performance space to help measure load time.
Apache JMeter describes itself as a Java application that was designed specifically for load testing with the ability to measure application performance and response times.
JMeter was built to be the open-source alternative to LoadRunner, so you’ll find it has many sophisticated features. It’s a thick client Java app that’s largely driven by right clicks. It’s a little weird, but it’s got a lot of power. Also, all the features a professional load tester wants are available on JMeter.
Key Features
- The ability to performance test a host of technologies using a range of protocols such as Java Objects, Web HTTP/HTTPS, SOAP and Rest Services, FTP, and Databases with JDBC
- A nice IDE you can use for recording, building, and debugging your performance tests.
- Starting with JMeter 3.1, Groovy is the default programming language
- One of the more popular load testing tools
- Can configure it to help test the mobile performance of mobile apps
- Using jmeter-java-dsl, you can write your performance tests in Java and take advantage of IDEs autocompletion and inline documentation.
