HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
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Tricentis NeoLoad
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Tricentis NeoLoad is a solution for continuous performance testing software to automate API and application load testing. It was developed by the French company Neotys and acquired by Tricentis, along with the company, in March 2021.
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
While Tricentis NeoLoad supports SAP GUI protocols, recording and maintaining test scripts for complex SAP transactions (like those in the OTC module) can be cumbersome.
For instance, we had challenges recording a VA01 (Sales Order Creation) transaction because of the dynamic nature of SAP screen fields and session handling. NeoLoad sometimes struggles to properly correlate or handle SAP’s SAPGUI Dynpro fields automatically.
With Tricentis NeoLoad, we have control on the test dynamically. One can alter user count/volume even when test is in progress. This makes it a very cool tool as you can avoid running multiple tests eventually saves a lot of time.
Tricentis NeoLoad user paths are very well structured. End points can be identified and tweaked easily especially when a large list of endpoints are part of the neoload project.
Tricentis NeoLoad results comparison is one of the cool options. We can compare previous tests against the current one to see the exact delta between transaction metrics. This helps in gauging the application behaviour with changes deployed
A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
Ease of use: Some users find certain features or aspects of the interface to be confusing or hard to use. Improving the overall usability of the tool could make it more accessible and easier for users to get up and running with it.
Integration with other tools: Tricentis NeoLoad does not have many integrations with other tools. Adding more integrations with popular tools and platforms could make it easier for users to work with Tricentis NeoLoad as part of their overall workflow.
Mobile testing: Some users wish that Tricentis NeoLoad had more robust support for testing the performance of mobile applications. This could include the ability to simulate different mobile devices and networks, as well as the ability to test the performance of native mobile apps.
Cloud support: Tricentis NeoLoad does not have as much support for cloud-based applications and infrastructure. Adding more support for testing the performance of applications hosted in the cloud could be a useful feature for some users.
Advanced scripting capabilities: While Tricentis NeoLoad does offer some scripting capabilities, it would be nice to have more advanced options for customizing and automating load testing scenarios. Adding more advanced scripting capabilities could make it easier for users to create complex load testing scenarios.
We find NeoLoad easy to use compared to their competitors. It requires minimal coding knowledge, also it is easy to train newcomers with NeoLoad. It also offers good integration and automation capability where with less code you can automate your testing process
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
This is the only area where we strongly feel Tricentis needs to improve. Their support process is inadequate, representatives are not so capable of providing solutions at one shot without consulting their internal engineering teams. Most importantly, the time they take to resolve simple issues is huge and at many times hampered our work.
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
When we used Apache JMeter we faced some problems like less documentation is available for integrating tools, and some integrations have not yet been deployed. Very few plugin updates are made. Since customer support is an open source tool, it is a major problem. While Tricentis Neoload provides better documentations and customer services.
Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
Performance testing is like an insurance. An online store which is not available causes a loss of sales. Without a performance test you do not know if it might happen. The invest into performance tests reduces the risk of loosing sales. The flexible license model of NeoLoad allows or customers to choose reasonable and suiteable rate.
