There are 100s of performance testing tools in the market but only a few are the most popular and widely used. We have listed from the most popular to low popular in sequence.
Loadrunner
Loadrunner from Hewlett-Packard is one of the top performance testing tools. It is mainly used to test the performance of an application by simulating 100’s of users into the application and monitor the performance of an application on different loads to identify and resolve the issues before the application go live. You can do different types of performance testing’s using Loadrunner such as load testing, stress testing, endurance testing etc. It supports more than 70 protocols including web technologies, CRM applications, Java, and .Net applications. You name a technology and you have a protocol for it in Loadrunner that makes the Loadrunner a popular and the most widely used tool in the market. Loadrunner also supports to simulate the load from top cloud networks such HP Cloud, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft.
HP Performance Center: It is a web based application and you can do your performance testing from wherever you have access to the performance center. You need to generate the scripts in Loadrunner and upload the scripts to Performance center. The large scale companies will use HP Performance Center to run multiple applications. You can also book your time slots to test the application according to availability of performance center.
JMeter
An open source performance testing tool from Apache and is purely developed in Java. JMeter has become very popular in a little time span as it is open source and it has huge online community support. If you say free open source tool for performance testing, then the JMeter name will come out to your mind.
It supports protocols such as web, web services, FTP etc.
BlazeMeter: It is a load testing platform-as-a-service which is purely developed with the integration of Apache JMeter. It provides different tools and APIs for the developers to easily performance test an applications using JMeter and expedite the performance testing process. You can test n number of users using BlazeMeter and Amazon AWS Cloud Service.
Rational Performance Tester
This tool is developed by IBM, and it is purely developed in the open-source eclipse framework. This tool also supports web, web services, and CRM applications. IBM has introduced pay-as-you-go model through the IBM cloud, where you can test your applications with the help of IBM cloud and you have the flexibility to increase the virtual users load according to the requirement.
Visual Studio(VSTS) Performance Testing
This tool is developed by Microsoft, the VSTS includes different testing tools, it also includes a performance testing tool which enables to test different type of performance testing’s such as Load Testing, Stress testing, Volume Testing etc.