Micro Focus LoadRunner Alternatives:

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If you’ve been searching for a powerful, cost-effective alternative to LoadRunner from Micro Focus, you’ve come to the right source. LoadView provides flexible, cloud-based load testing, removing the complexity of having to set up and manage an on-premises solution like LoadRunner.

LoadRunner was one of the early pioneers of the performance testing arena. The product has many great features, benefits, and integrations. It supports a wide range of protocols, which a lot of other vendors can’t offer, which has made LoadRunner the go-to vendor in this space for a long time. However, we hear from many customers that LoadRunner has become too complex and costly for what their performance testing needs, which leads them to look for an on-demand, cloud-based platform like LoadView.

In this article, we’ll outline and compare the various feature and benefits of each product and you can decide for yourself which product best fits your load and stress testing needs.

LoadView: Built for Performance and Efficiency

LoadView was created with a couple of essential considerations, performance and efficiency, taking away the tasks that other tools require, like having to set up load generators and hardware.  With LoadView, you don’t have to worry about those aspects.

The LoadView platform can perform load and stress tests for your websites, web application, web services, and APIs – all from a single interface.

Additionally, a lot of the same teams and individuals within an organization that are tasked with monitoring their sites and applications for uptime and availability in production are also interested in testing the limits of their infrastructure during the development phase. Utilizing LoadView during the development phase ensures that the code and applications being built are continually optimized throughout the process, versus finding out later where your bottlenecks and bugs are located. It’s all about maintaining a consistent, first-rate experience for your customers and users.

When it comes to sluggish sites and applications, users can quickly become impatient and will leave to find a replacement. That usually means they’ll head right over to your competition.

LoadRunner from Micro Focus

LoadRunner from Micro Focus is their on-premises performance testing solution used to simulate user transactions and measure system behavior and performance under load, helping DevOps and engineers to uncover errors and bottlenecks. LoadRunner is comprised of three key components:

• VuGen (Virtual User Generator)

This is the tool that is used to create and edit test scripts that simulate behavior of real users on your system. Note that the Virtual User Generator tool is not web-based and must be downloaded to a user’s machine. The scripts created with this tool also work with their other products, such as StormRunner, Performance Center, Application Performance Management, and AppPulse Active.

• Controller

Controls, launches, and sequences the load generator instances, scenarios, and specifies which script to use, duration, etc. The controller also receives real-time monitoring data and displays status.

• Analysis

Gathers the data and logs from various load generators and formats reports for visualization of run result data and monitoring data.

LoadRunner must be installed on Windows or Linux systems and supports over 50 protocols. Some of the more popular options include the following:

Similar to LoadView, LoadRunner allows performance engineers to design real-world scenarios to simulate hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, helping developers to later analyze the performance of key components, such as response time and code-level performance within their applications. However, unlike LoadView, LoadRunner users also have the option of integrating their JMeter performance testing scripts for performance testing, as well as the following popular third-party and open source CI/CD platforms to help facilitate collaboration within DevOps teams:

• IDE
• Jenkins
• Dynatrace
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• jUnit
• nUnit
• Selenium

LoadView: Scripting with the EveryStep Web Recorder

The EveryStep Web Recorder is a FREE, web-based scripting tool that records every step of a web transaction and replays the script using a real browser. There are no additional plugins or downloads required.

Record multi-step test scripts of critical and complex user actions, such as button clicks, menu selections, form submission, shopping carts, text inputs, and more. These scripts can then be uploaded into the LoadView platform for load testing your websites, web application, web services, and APIs.

Scripts can be record with over 40 desktop and mobile browsers (iPhone, iPad, Google, Samsung, etc.), the EveryStep Web Recorder supports virtually anything rendered in a browser, regardless of the technologies used. LoadView supports the following set of popular languages/technologies:

LoadView: Load Simulation Methods

Many load testing solutions, notably the open-source variety, can only run protocol-based user simulations, which is not enough for today’s applications. Stressing the server is great at the protocol level, but you’re missing a big part of the end-to-end response time. When it comes to testing web applications, you need to know what’s going on with the behavior and performance on the client-side. LoadView can run multiple user simulation types: HTTP/S and real browser-based tests.

Additionally, LoadView users can pick from more than 15 geo-locations around the world to run their tests from, ensuring real-world performance results from wherever your uers or clients are located.

Launch the EveryStep Web Recorder Now!

LoadRunner: Scripting with Virtual user Generator (VuGen)

VuGen is the primary tool used to create and replay LoadRunner scripts to emulate user behavior, known as a Vuser. It’s important to note that VuGen can only record scripts on Windows and can be replayed on both Windows and Linux platforms. There are three Vuser types – Protocol-based, Unit Test-based, and GUI, depending on your requirements. It’s also important to note that when a VuGen scripts are replayed, they do not emulate the actual user actions on the browser. Instead, they emulate those requests that get generated as a result of the user actions.

There are some known limitations to VuGen. Some of the more common issues users run into include the following:

• The browser can block certain actions when using Internet Explorer on a Windows machine
• JavaScript scripts may run slow due. Clearing the Enable JavaScript debugging mode may help.
• McAffe may cause VuGen to be unable to perform certain operations and/or crash. Some users report that disabling any anti-virus software you may be running is the safest option to avoid any issues.

These scripts can also be used in conjunction with their other performance testing and monitoring products, such as StormRunner, Performance Center, Application Performance Management, and AppPulse Active.

LoadRunner: Additional Integrations

LoadRunner integrates with other Micro Focus monitoring tools, Micro Focus Diagnostics and Micro Focus Sitescope. These monitoring tool assist with finding the root-cause of issues across an organization’s heterogeneous environment. This enables performance engineers or developers to carry out high-scale tests with minimal hardware for any combination of physical and virtual environments, including the following public cloud infrastructures and container platforms:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Azure
• Digital Ocean
• Google Cloud Platform
• Docker

LoadRunner also can also integrate with network and service virtualization. This is important when you need to test real-world network conditions or when you utilize a third-party service that you must still load test for, such as credit card processing. All of these integrations help performance engineers and developers to optimize performance prior to deployment by eliminating risks and bottlenecks, minimize cost by measuring and predicting capacity, and reduce test cycle time.

Although LoadRunner is extensive, integrates with many tools, and supports many protocols and technologies, many users have expressed some of the same concerns:

• It’s expensive compared to other commercially available tools and platforms
• Not user friendly
• Scripting can take a long time, especially with complex scripts
• Reusing the scripts can be difficult
• Their support is good, but if you require 24×7 support, you must pay an additional fee above and beyond what you’re currently paying

LoadRunner Pricing

• Free Trial (Community Edition)
• Free for life
• 50 community virtual users
• Full product capabilities. Includes all protocols except COM/DCOM, Templates, and GUI
• Network virtualization
• Cloud scaling via Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure
• Access to the Micro Focus community

Virtual User Days – Starting at $1.40/virtual user per day

• Pricing varies based on the number of users to test load on your application or website in a 24-hour period.

Volume Pricing – Contact their Sales team for custom pricing

LoadView Pricing and Professional Services

LoadView has subscription-based plans, starting at $199 per month.  With our subscription-based plans, unused virtual user minutes and load injector hours roll over from one month to the next.  Alternatively, you can also select from a pay-as-you-go plan. Pricing is calculated and displayed before you begin new test, so you know exactly what you’re paying for.

If your specific needs require more than what is listed above, please contact us for a customized plan.

Professional Services are another option availble for customers if additional performance testing resources aren’t available in-house.  We offer any and all elements of the load testing process that you need assitance with.