Apache JMeter vs. OpenText LoadRunner Professional

JMeter is well suited for Java applications where the user can script the scenario once and make changes to accommodate for as many numbers of users for load test execution. The image and selection of any files or exporting files scenario is handled well.

It is less appropriate to test Ajax applications where it is required to script click per use.

Incentivized

Micro Focus LoadRunner and its suite of tools, specifically VuGen works wonderfully for us for all web, http/https and web service calls. We've been able to build tests for near any scenario we need with relative ease. As long as we have crafted up requirements for our scenarios / scripts to managed scope, we've had high success working with scripting and data driving. Our main tests are web service calls - typically chained together to form a full scenario with transactions measuring the journey or a similar (measure along the way) journey through a browser. For web services we will use VuGen and browser we've shifted to Tru Client I have had little-to-no experience scripting against a thick client where a ui-driven test would be required. I know its possible but quite costly due to the need to run the actual desktop client to drive tests. We've been fortunate enough to leverage http calls to represent client traffic.

Incentivized

• Easy of use - in generate load like HTTP requests, and processing/analyzing the responses. No coding is necessary at the basic level, just need to understand load testing and the infrastructure being tested.
• Automatic management of things like cookies to help with session state support - so you don't specifically have to worry about it or handle it
• Lots of testing/configuration options to suit your needs in making the right load generation (sampling requests), and analyzing the results, including any pre and post processing of the results first. Things like the Beanshell/BSF pre/post processors, response assertion, regular expression extractor, XPath extractor, CSV data set config
• There is a JMeter cloud service called BlazeMeter that I think would be useful for those that need to scale up high load without provisioning their own systems. I've not personally tried it though, but I recently attended a meetup presentation that highlighted nice useful features that BlazeMeter provides. One should evaluate the service if they are considering JMeter and need to expand beyond existing hardware resources.

• It can simulate multiple users at the same time and help understand the performance.
• It can generate excellent reports and give insights into application performance.
• It is a fast tool and does not take time to perform its functions.

Incentivized

• Jmeter requires many tweaks with respect to its configuration file and thread properties. users need to edit theses files themselves. There could be some interface where we can edit this fields.
• Jmeter cannot handle more threads and hangs up when we increase the number of threads. This causes lot of inconvenience. In these situations, user can be notified that such change would be lead to slow performance so that user can do as required. The same appears when we try to view huge files on graph listener.
• Jmeter should optimize the read and write access to output csv since it acts as overhead to the I/O performance. This affects our test results for the application which we are testing.

• HP LoadRunner with new patches and releases sometimes makes no longer support older version of various protocols like Citrix, which makes the task time-consuming when using older versions of LoadRunner for some of the cases. So it should support older version as well while upgrading.
• Configuring HP LoadRunner over the firewall involves lots of configuration and may be troublesome. So, there should be a script (power shell script for Windows or shell script for Linux users) to make it easy to use and with less pain.
• I would like to see the RunTime Viewer of Vugen in HPLoadRunner based on the browser I selected in the run-time configuration to make it feel more realistic as a real user.
• Licensing cost is very high when we need to perform a test on application for a specific group of users.

Incentivized

Price, Wiki and user sharing. Having access to the information provided by the developers and other open source providers is key for me. The ability to share information and get answers directly is very important to success in software testing. And the price of this product currently is amazing. Too many companies charge way too much money for products that are far behind in their value and pertinence

I can jump right into a new test plan and start building from scratch. The natural progression from test plan to thread group and then designing the basic format of the process is very streamlined and smooth. With only slight modifications I can build out a very complex model from a very basic beginning.

I have been using JMeter for the last year. By using this tool, you can make sure the system will work under varied loads. It helps us to simulate real time scenarios by creating required virtual users and make sure the application will work under load. Perform load, stress, and stability testing using JMeter.

Incentivized

Customer service is not that great. It's difficult to get hold of someone if an issue is supposed to be addressed on an urgent basis. No online chat service readily available.

Incentivized

I have used LoadRunner and Silkperformer, and so far Jmeter turns out be the easiest to use of all these. While each of them have their own ROI, Jmeter can be picked by anyone in hours and start testing within a day. While with other tools, we need to get license, install them (takes a while) and setup tests and firewalls, etc.

HP performance center stacks up very well for front end applications. Need more improvements for API performance testing.

Incentivized

• Good ROI on improving the performance of the application.
• Finding issues in the performance.
• Benchmark the performance results.
• CON: Need skillset to create and maintain the scripts in Java.
• Scripts are reusable and it is executed by any user.
• Need Client and Server setup to execute the scripts.

Incentivized

• The scripts created with traditional web/http protocol are not robust thus re-scripting is required after most every code drop. Troubleshooting and fixing the issue takes more time therefore in most cases we do re-scripting to keep it simple and save time.
• In ideal world you would rather spend more time doing testing than scripting in that case mostly you could use an Ajax TruClient protocol. This type of script will only fail when an object in the application is removed or changed completely. This way of scripting will save you more time and helps you maintain the scripts with less re-work effort on a release basis. On the long run you will have a better ROI when you use Ajax TruClient protocol for scripting.

Incentivized