The Best Performance Testing Tools in 2025

Your app is only as good as how it performs in real-world scenarios. Today’s users expect the most optimal experiences—fast load time, smooth interactions, and stability—regardless of traffic spikes or server demands. So, how do you ensure that this will always be the case?

Through performance testing.

It’s a software testing technique that proactively identifies performance bottlenecks and system efficiencies, such as high CPU utilization, memory leaks, improper caching, and slow queries before the app goes into production and is made live for the end users.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the top 20 performance testing tools in 2025.

20 Performance Testing Tools in 2025

The great news is different performance testing tools in the market serve your purpose (and budget). Let’s explore them in detail.

1. TestGrid

TestGrid is an AI-powered end-to-end testing platform that enables web, mobile, and API testing with seamless automation and real device execution. You don’t need any complex infrastructure to optimize app performance.

Simply run tests on actual devices and browsers to obtain actionable data – repeatedly and with consistent accuracy. TestGrid helps you detect vulnerabilities early and verify that your app remains stable and responsive even after updates or feature changes.

In addition, the platform integrates effortlessly with leading CI/CD tools, enabling you to ensure rapid delivery cycles without compromising app quality.

With quick alerts and faster debugging, you can prevent errors before they reach production, minimizing the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). TestGrid is undoubtedly an excellent tool for performance testing.

A standout feature is CoTester, the world’s first AI agent for software testing. Pre-trained on advanced software testing fundamentals and SLDC, it uses true AI to understand user intent without rigid syntax constraints, unlike other AI testers that are primarily syntax-driven.

It creates detailed test case descriptions and comes with a step-by-step editor for automation workflows. The editor showcases the sequence of interactions with elements like web forms and uses placeholder data for missing inputs.

Have a look at how CoTester fares against other agentic AI platforms.

Best Features

• Test native, hybrid, and web applications on 1000+ Android and iOS devices
• Deploy business-critical tests on TestOS with private, dedicated deployment—at no extra cost
• Detect even the slightest visual deviations with robust visual testing—without adding any external SDK
• Record actions, create test scripts and automate tests in minutes with the intuitive ‘record and playback’ feature
• Assess app performance across devices with varying battery life, network conditions, responsiveness, and swipe gestures
• Manage broader project tasks by logging bugs, assigning them to team members, taking sprint notes, and setting task reminders

Pricing

• Freemium: $0 per month (200 minutes per 2 minute session)
• Manual Testing: $25 per month (5 users, 1 parallel test)
• End-to-End Automation: $99 per month (5 users, 1 parallel test)
• Private Dedicated: Starts from $30 per month (5 users, 1 dedicated device)
• Enterprise (On-premise/Hosted): Custom pricing

2. OctoPerf

Jumpstart your performance testing with OctoPerf, which is built for teams of all skill levels.

The tool allows you to write scripts or import your JMeter scripts and start scaling. It effortlessly handles large-scale testing scenarios directly from your web browser, aligning with user growth on demand.

Best Features

• Run performance tests as part of your sprint or when needed with CI/CD integrations
• Gain deep insights with its advanced results engine and benefit from unparalleled clarity and actionable data
• Integrate testing with APM leaders, CI/CD tools, messaging solutions, Jira, and Playwright to unify your tech stack

Pricing

• k6 Open Source: Free (Build and debug locally)
• Free: $0 (Test up to 50 concurrent users)
• Unlimited: Starting at $677 for unlimited tests
• Pay-Per-Test: Starting at €72 for a single 1,000 Virtual Users

3. Locust.io

Locust.io is a modern load-testing framework. Its user-friendly web interface shows the test progress in real-time. You can even change the load while the test is running. The best part? It can test almost any system or protocol, like FTP, TCP, or HTTP.

You only need to create a small program (a client) that interacts with what you’re testing.

Best Features

• Simulate millions of simultaneous users as the tool supports running load tests distributed over multiple machines
• Write your tests like usual (blocking) Python code instead of having to use callbacks or some other mechanism
• Easily install Locust from PyPI using pip

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

4. Tsung

Tsung is a powerful open-source tool designed for distributed load testing of web applications, databases, and protocols such as HTTP, WebSockets, XMPP, and MQTT.

It helps developers and system administrators simulate high traffic, measure performance, and identify bottlenecks in their systems. Built with Erlang, Tsung enables you to handle thousands of simultaneous users, making it ideal for stress testing large-scale systems.

Best Features

• Reduce logging noise by adjusting log levels for better debugging
• Allow disabling SNI (Server Name Indication) for TLS connections
• Integrate PURGE method for Varnish caching support

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

5. OpenText Core Performance Engineering

Previously known as LoadRunner Cloud, OpenText Core Performance Engineering is a tool for performance testing on the cloud. To perform checks, you don’t need to deploy or manage infrastructure, such as load generators or controllers.

Test mobile and web technologies, packaged apps, and legacy systems efficiently.

Best Features

• Leverage shift-left testing to align with Agile and DevOps methodologies and resolve issues faster
• Utilize OpenText Core Performance Engineering scripts and open-source tools, or create a test using a REST API, CSV file, or HAR file
• Accurately simulate customer experiences across any app or device while capturing valuable client-side metrics, such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Pricing

• Contact sales for custom pricing

6. Apache JMeter

Apache JMeter is an open-source Java-based tool that tests the app’s functional behavior and measures performance.

It checks static and dynamic web, FTP, TCP, mail, and database resources. It can simulate a heavy load on a server, group of servers, network, or object to test its strength or analyze overall performance under different load types.

Best Features

• Analyze or replay test results in cache or offline mode
• Extract data from the most common response formats, such as HTML, JSON, and XML
• Allow concurrent sampling by many threads and simultaneous sampling of different functions by separate thread groups

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

7. Tricentis NeoLoad

Tricentis NeoLoad is a cloud load and performance testing platform. Its innovative protocol and browser-based capabilities allow you to native-test APIs, microservices, and web and mobile apps. It can integrate with your entire tech stack, from the DevOps toolchain to legacy systems.

Best Features

• Effortlessly design tests via no-code and low-code, modify variables, and validate user paths
• Simplify test design creation with loops, conditions, and other drag-and-drop controls
• Capture, centralize, and analyze JMeter and Gatling execution results in NeoLoad

Pricing

• Contact sales for custom pricing

8. Gatling

Gatling is one of the popular software performance testing tools designed for DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, making it possible to automate your load tests for superior performance. Test your app where your users are located – with conditions similar to your expected traffic.

Quickly generate scenarios by acting as an HTTP proxy.

Best Features

• Write your test scripts (in Java, JavaScript, and TypeScript) and use your datasets and libraries to craft complex user behaviors
• Create and share custom reports and analyses, highlighting the most crucial data points
• Get support from major cloud providers, including Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure

Pricing

• Basic: $103.69 per month (Covers up to 60,000 Virtual Users)
• Team: $414.76 per month (Covers up to 180,000 Virtual Users)
• Enterprise: Contact sales for custom pricing (Test any number of Virtual Users)

9. LoadNinja

Performance testing doesn’t have to be a hassle. LoadNinja is one of the best performance testing tools in the market, and it can record, replay, and test in real browsers at scale. With its InstaPlay Recorder, you can create web and API web load tests in minutes.

You don’t need to know coding – even for testing the most complex transactions.

Best Features

• Use real browsers for conducting load tests and create the most realistic representation of load in the infrastructure supporting apps under test
• Get actionable insights on browser-based navigation timings, network data, and response cycles to isolate bugs in the app quickly
• Apply flexible tools like the LoadNinja REST API and custom CI/CD plugins to automate your UI testing

Pricing

• Professional: $350 per 25 load testing hours (Test up to 55 Virtual Users)
• Enterprise: Contact sales for custom pricing (Test any number of Virtual Users)

10. BlazeMeter

BlazeMeter is an open-source performance testing tool. It runs reliable tests against your apps, including mobile and web apps, microservices, and APIs: control threads, hits/sec, arrival rates, and more in real time.

Tap into the potential of its multi-test capabilities and analyze all your tests in smaller components and parallel to speed test cycles.

Best Features

• Ensure accurate and effective API testing in dynamic environments using its Auto Correlation plugin; detect dynamic parameters in recorded test scripts
• Test both your mobile user experience and your backend under load in the cloud and scale up to two million virtual users
• Drive load from behind your firewall with its Dockerized private agents. Install in minutes and start testing

Pricing

• Basic: $149 per month (Ideal for small teams)
• Pro: Contact sales for custom pricing (Best for growing businesses)
• Unleashed: Contact sales for custom pricing (Suitable for large organizations)
• AWS: Purchase via AWS (Suitable for large organizations) 

11. New Relic

New Relic is a performance testing platform that gives you a live and in-depth view of your network, infrastructure, applications, end-user experience, and Machine Learning (ML) models.

Its primary function is Application Performance Monitoring (APM), which collects detailed data about how apps perform, including metrics like error rates, response times, and resource usage across different components/modules, such as databases and servers.

Best Features

• Plan, prioritize, and begin tasks from your IDE; know exactly when sudden changes happen with simple dynamic visuals that change colors in real time
• Build personalized dashboards by pulling data from multiple sources, making the most 400+ available integrations
• Quickly ingest and search any volume of on-prem and cloud data and segment it any way that you want

Pricing

• Free: Start for free (One free full platform user)
• Standard: Contact sales for custom pricing (Limited to 5 full platform users)
• Pro: Contact sales for custom pricing (Unlimited full platform users)
• Enterprise: Contact sales for custom pricing (Full consumption pricing with no user licenses)

12. Artillery

Artillery is a scalable, flexible, and easy-to-use platform with all the features and functionalities needed for production-grade load testing. You can test web apps, GraphQL services, HTTP APIs, Socket.IO, Kafka, and gRPC.

You can access 20+ integrations and plugins for monitoring, observability (including OpenTelemetry), CI/CD pipelines, and IDEs (VS Code and WebStorm).

Best Features

• Scale out your load tests with serverless load generators that run in your own AWS or Azure account – no need to invest in setting up or managing infrastructure
• Launch thousands of headless browsers with Playwright code and check how your web app handles high load and the impact on Core Web Vitals
• Visualize test results, share reports, analyze performance trends, and collaborate with your team

Pricing

• Free Forever (For teams just starting with load testing)
• Paid: $499 per month (For teams running continuous load tests on production apps)

13. Dynatrace

Although not a typical performance testing tool, Dynatrace does provide deep insights into how apps behave under load. This observability and application performance monitoring (APM) utilizes runtime context to precisely detect and block common app attacks, including command injection and SQL injection.

Best Features

• Secure data with enterprise-grade privacy and compliance management
• Optimize your digital experiences by analyzing real-user and synthetic monitoring and session replays
• Integrate intelligent and intuitive analytics from log data, from troubleshooting to business processes, into your testing workflows

Pricing

• Full-stack monitoring: $0.08 per hour for 8 GiB host
• Infrastructure monitoring: $0.04 per hour for any size host
• Application security: $0.018 per hour for 8 GiB host
• Real user monitoring: $0.00225 per session
• Synthetic monitoring: $0.001 per synthetic request

14. Puppeteer WebPerf

Puppeteer WebPerf is a Node.js library that offers a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It automates web performance measurements using Puppeteer. You can capture DevTools performance traces for page loads and user interactions for in-depth analysis of performance bottlenecks.

It also allows you to access Navigation Timing API metrics to analyze different phases of page loading.

Best Features

• Generate performance traces with screenshots and extract filmstrip screenshots to visualize rendering over time
• Retrieve runtime performance metrics such as layout duration, style recalculations, and JavaScript event listeners
• Simulate various network conditions and CPU throttling to test performance under different scenarios

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

15. WebLOAD

WebLOAD by RadView is the go-to performance testing platform for those who need accuracy and reliability in complex scenarios. You can use the tool on the cloud—simply upload your scripts and run tests from different locations.

Or, generate load using your infrastructure on-premises (your data center) or in the cloud (AWS, Azure, and GCP).

Best Features

• Create scripts that automatically manage session-specific data like IDs and tokens during recording using WebLOAD’s automatic correlation engine
• Maximize testing efficiency with real-time analytics, reporting engine, AI insights, and ChatGPT integration
• Simulate realistic load, identify and fix bottlenecks, and retest to validate improvements

Pricing

• Monthly subscription: 499$/month (Up to 500 concurrent Virtual Users)
• Professional: Contact sales for custom pricing (Up to 10,000 concurrent Virtual Users)
• Enterprise: Contact sales for custom pricing (Up to 100,000 concurrent Virtual Users)

16. Fortio

Originally developed for Istio, an open-source service mesh, Fortio is an independent microservices load testing library.

It includes additional capabilities like CLI, an advanced echo server, and a web UI. Fortio allows for the specification of a set query-per-second load and records histograms of execution time. It supports constant QPS or maximum speed/load per connection/thread.

Best Features

• Calculate and visualize percentiles, min, max, avg, and QPS metrics via comparative performance graphs
• Request echo back, including headers, adding latency or error codes with a probability distribution
• Use Fortio components even for unrelated projects, for instance, the log, stats, or HTTP utilities of both client and server

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

17. IBM Rational Performance Tester (RPT)

IBM Rational Performance Tester is a part of IBM’s DevOps Test Performance Suite.

It helps validate the scalability of web and server apps, identify performance issues, and execute performance tests by creating test scripts. You don’t need to do any programming, which means you can save time and significantly minimize test complexity.

Best Features

• Model and emulate diverse user populations while minimizing the memory and processor footprint
• Execute load testing against a broad base of applications such as SAP, HTTP, Siebel, Citrix, and TCP Socket
• Use root-cause analysis tools to help identify both the source code and physical application tier that are causing performance issues

Pricing

• Contact sales for custom pricing

18. k6

K6 is a platform for performance and load testing. It helps verify that apps can handle unexpected traffic. Whether stress tests, soak tests, or smoke tests, you can conduct them all. Shift left and collaborate with developers for effective and continuous testing.

The K6 API and CLI are designed to be intuitive, flexible, and powerful.

Best Features

• Inject faults in Kubernetes-based apps to recreate application errors and test resilience patterns and tolerance of internal errors to improve reliability
• Collect frontend metrics to get a holistic view of how users interact with real browsers
• Output test results to various backends like DataDog, Prometheus, and NewRelic

Pricing

• Free Forever: $0
• Pro: $19 per month (Pay as you go monthly for any usage exceeding the free tier)
• Advanced: $299 per month (2x included usage, Enterprise plugins, and 24×7 support)

19. Apache Bench

Benchmark your Apache HTTP server to measure performance and request handling capacity with Apache Bench. It’s a performance testing tool that enables you to analyze how many requests your server can process efficiently per second.

You can evaluate server response times, failed requests, and throughput under different loads.

Best Features

• Simulate multiple concurrent users to assess server load handling
• Test both HTTP and HTTPS performance with customizable SSL/TLS settings
• Monitor key metrics like requests per second, transfer rates, and response codes

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

20. Siege

Siege is an HTTP load tester and benchmarking utility tool. It can simultaneously load multiple URLs into its memory and put them under high load or pressure for testing. Siege supports HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 protocols, the GET and POST directives, cookies, and transaction logging.

Best Features

• Configure most features using CLI options, which define default values to simplify the system is started or executed
• Stress a web server with ‘n’ number of users ‘t’ number of times, where ‘n’ and ‘t’ are defined by the user
• Report the number of transactions, elapsed/response time, and bytes transferred

Pricing

• It’s free to use as it’s open-sourced

Criteria for Selecting Performance Testing Tools

Now that we’ve reviewed all the best performance testing tools in the market, let’s study a few factors you must consider while selecting one for your requirements:

• The tool should support web, mobile, APIs, and backend services, including GraphQL, WebSockets, and HTTP
• It should support scripting in major languages your team uses, such as Java, JavaScript, Python
• It should simulate thousands (if not millions) of users without performance degradation
• It should automate within your DevOps pipeline for continuous performance validation
• It should offer detailed analytics on response times, error rates, and infrastructure health
• It should enable the geolocation of user traffic and network condition emulation
• Whether you choose open-source or enterprise performance testing tools, make sure the choice is based on your budget, support needs, and scalability

Optimize Your App with Performance Testing Tools

Performance testing is a vital step in deploying changes to the environments. Choose a tool that aligns with your architecture, integrates with your workflow, and provides actionable insights. Of course, TestGrid is a fantastic option, offering a balance of automation, scalability, and deep analytics to keep the app fast and reliable.

Sign up for a free trial if you want a sneak peek into the results you can expect with TestGrid.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Are load, stress, and scalability testing the same?

No. These are three completely different types of testing. While load testing evaluates system behavior under expected traffic loads, stress testing assesses an app’s breaking points and failure recovery mechanisms by pushing it beyond its normal limits—basically, by putting it under much stress. On the other hand, scalability testing checks whether the system can manage increasing workloads horizontally and vertically.

2. How do you determine an app’s acceptable performance benchmarks?

Benchmarks vary by industry—financial services demand sub-millisecond latencies, while eCommerce platforms focus on handling peak load surges without downtime. Use historical performance data, competitor analysis, and user experience metrics to set realistic thresholds.  

3. How does performance testing work?

Typically, such testing happens by simulating real user activity at scale. It generates concurrent requests, monitors system behavior, and captures performance metrics like throughput and resource consumption. Performance testing works by:

• Defining test scenarios—for example, database stress conditions
• Executing load tests by sending requests and tracking system responses
• Analyzing collected metrics to spot issues
• Comparing results against predefined SLAs and best practices—for example, ensuring API responses remain under 300m under load