Easy to use, stable tool for Performance Testing
Updated October 01, 2023

Easy to use, stable tool for Performance Testing

MS Puranik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tricentis NeoLoad

We use Tricentis NeoLoad for our performance testing and engineering requirements. As a Product based company, we develop and maintain multiple products that are being used by millions of users worldwide. Therefore it is in our culture to give extreme importance to Application Performance. That being said, I work in a centralized team that is responsible for measuring, identifying, and tuning performance issues across all the products that go out of the Company, and also addressing issues faced by the customers. We need a solid tool for recording the real-world use cases, scripting them, and designing performance scenarios that are as close to how it happens in production and Tricentis NeoLoad addresses our needs on a daily basis. Though Tricentis NeoLoad can also be used for other purposes such as functional and security testing, we use it extensively only for various types of performance testing.
  • User friendly GUI
  • Strong support for correlations
  • Minimal coding requirements
  • Stable, does not crash even under heavy load
  • Integration with third-party tools. I cannot stream NL test data to a third-party DB and then plot graphs out of it.
  • Keyboard shortcuts. It is tedious to use the mouse to click everywhere. I'd love to have some keyboard shortcuts
  • Reports and Analytics. Lacks intelligence in identifying patterns of problems
  • Time! Less coding work resulted in faster scripting
  • Stability. We did not have to plan for contingency while planning for a test run. Tricentis NeoLoad almost never crashed
  • It does not demand any advanced skill, as there is almost no coding involved.
This is a problem that we are trying to address currently. We want to build a robust, automated performance testing framework that could be used by multiple people across our Organization, thereby reducing our effort in supporting simple tasks. The previous tool that we were using was very poor with automation, we had to go around the bush to automate simple tasks. Tricentis NeoLoad however, provides a strong CLI package with which we can easily create tests, schedule the run, and pull the reports. We wrapped the CLI with our in-house infrastructure building stage, together resulting in a completely automated performance testing framework that is helping us save hundreds of man-hours. This is truly testing at scale.
Maintenance is really easy with Tricentis NeoLoad - we can repair an existing user path without having to re-record. This saves a lot of time, especially if there are multiple builds with code changes of a target application. We had to discard the current script and re-record a new one each time a new build with code changes was received, with our previous tool. However, Tricentis NeoLoad handles minor adjustments to its scripts gracefully, I can tweak around the URLs, and correlated values so that I don't have to re-record. Coming to design - any layman can grasp Tricentis NeoLoad in a couple of weeks since it has a very user-friendly GUI and requires almost zero coding knowledge. This enables junior technicians to take up scripting, while experience folks can concentrate on other important tasks at hand.

Do you think Tricentis NeoLoad delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Tricentis NeoLoad's feature set?

Yes

Did Tricentis NeoLoad live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Tricentis NeoLoad go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Tricentis NeoLoad again?

Yes

Before purchasing Tricentis NeoLoad, we were using a similar Javascript-based tool from another vendor for years. The major issue we were facing was it was very unstable. We were not confident that we would get a test run successfully, especially if the test is heavy. Ex: A 24-hour load test with 3500 users. It used to crash at the end of the test, trying to pull data points, and we'd lose our precious 24 hours! Tricentis NeoLoad totally aces when it comes to stability. I can easily run the same test without having to worry about crashes or slowness. It also reduces the amount of coding that I had to do with the previous tool and saves much time. However, what I miss compared to the previous tool was flexibility. I could plug the previous tool with any third-party DB, stream and store the test data in a time-series DB, and then plot-important graphs out of it. Though Tricentis NeoLoad provides visuals by default, it does not provide any support for third-party integration.

Using Tricentis NeoLoad

25 - Core performance engineering team, performance testers, developers, QAs, software architects etc;
6 - The core performance team at my Organization develops and maintains scripts and frameworks in and around NeoLoad.
  • Low code performance testing requirement
  • Integration with CI toolkits such as Git, Jenkins, AWS etc
  • Integration with APM such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Datadog etc
  • User friendly, understandable structure of scripts
  • Used their CLI utility to automate entire testing effort, seamlessly integrated with AWS
  • Used it for quick functional validations
  • Developers found it intuitive to use
  • Build a holistic performance automation framework
  • Induce better visibility into performance metrics for SRE
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.

Evaluating Tricentis NeoLoad and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Integration with Other Systems
Most important priority for us was to automate the performance testing life cycle as much as possible. NeoLoad offers the automation capbility with their SaaS solution and a collaborative solution called NeoLoad Web, with which anybody across the Org can monitor, design the tests, view the results, generate the reports etc;
We should have researched more on their support capability and their SLO definitions on the support tickets raised.

Tricentis NeoLoad Implementation

  1. Their documentation is scattered over many places like GitHub read me files, their internal website etc;
  2. Support team takes huge time just to acknowledge our ticket
  3. No support to automatically migrate scripts from competetor tool into
Yes - In the first phase, my team did POCs on migrating test scripts from existing tool to NeoLoad. Although it was not a 100% success, we figured out that it is easy to rather record new script in NL rather than finding a way to migrate the scripts that lead to a lot of errors.
Second phase involved in building the test scripts, we had to get used to NeoLoad and their various features, which helped us master the software.
Final phase was to explore their automation and integration capability to build a completely hands free performance test automation framework.
Change management was minimal - NeoLoad creates random files in the file system each time you save a neoload project. This comes tedious when you check-in the scripts into your VCS like git.
Also, we tried to automate the repair process whenever a change is required to be made in an existing NeoLoad project, but the way the Project is stored in the file system is complex and it takes manual effort to import the project, alter it, and then export it back.
  • Lot of manual work
  • Hard to use with VCS
  • Poor support team

Tricentis NeoLoad 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.
ProsCons
Kept well informed
Slow Resolution
Less knowledgeable
Problems left unsolved
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
While I am not 100% sure, I think the support was inclusive in the deal we made with Tricentis. So no, we did not buy any top-up support option.
Yes - Resolved to our satisfaction - mostly yes.
Resolved in a timely fashion - unfortunately no.

We feel that the initial response is very mechanical and just designed to buy more time by asking us the questions that have already been answered in the ticket description. We had to escalate a couple of times to get them back on track. It took over 6 hours for the initial response even when a critical bug was raised.

Using Tricentis NeoLoad

  1. Low code solution
  2. Intuitive UI
  3. Full fledged features that can replace code
  4. Headless testing with their CLI
  5. Integraiton with third party APM
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Script recording using browsers
  • Automatic correlations using rules
  • Comparing two test results
  • Maintaining NL projects using version control systems like Github
  • NeoLoad Web's test report is very basic and does not give full information about the test
  • Tricentis' support team