SoapUI Pro vs. Open-Source Load Testing: Which is Better?

API load testing is an essential part of the testing process for websites and applications. Whether you have REST APIs or SOAP APIs, load testing API endpoints ensure your product’s performance under peak conditions. Besides manual testing, there are many open-source and commercial tools available in the market that you can employ to quickly set up your API load testing process and start testing for performance under the desired load.

SoapUI is one such industry-leading API testing tool that has been one of the go-to tools for developers and testers alike. With SoapUI, you can perform both functional and non-functional testing for your APIs or web services. It is a cross-platform tool based on Java that you can run on your preferred choice of operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Linux. 

What is SoapUI?

Let’s start with a little more introduction. SoapUI was developed in 2005, and SmartBear acquired it in 2011. It is an open-source API testing tool for testing REST and SOAP APIs. You can download it from their website and run on your operating system. Apart from various types of testing, it has the capabilities to inspect, monitor, invoke, mock, and simulate APIs and web services.

The following are the types of testing you can do with SoapUI for both REST & SOAP APIs- 

• Functional Testing
• Non-Functional Testing
• Security testing
• Load Testing
• Compliance Testing

SoapUI vs. SoapUI Pro for Load Testing

To begin with, load testing your APIs ensure that your website or application can handle the expected number of users (load) without any performance degradation. Load testing is done by generating a high number of users and analyzing how different resources are utilized and how responsive different functionalities are under the load. Load testing helps identify performance bottlenecks and other defects, which can be optimized to ensure speed, stability, and scalability.

Both the open-source and the commercial version of SoapUI offer load testing features. However, some extended functionalities that the open-source SoapUI version doesn’t cover can make a real difference for your load testing objectives based on your requirements.

Load Testing Features Covered by both SoapUI & SoapUI Pro

The following are some main features that come with both SoapUI and SoapUI Pro:

Rapid Load Tests from Functional Tests

SoapUI allows you to quickly create and run load tests from your functional tests, so you don’t have to switch between the functional and non-functional testing paradigm.

Configurable Load Strategies

You can configure your load for the time delay, bursts, interval, variance, and other useful options for detailed Load Testing.

Load Test Assertions

It is a similar concept to functional testing. You can validate the performance and functionality of your Load Test executions using assertions in SoapUI.

Real-Time Statistics

This feature is useful in monitoring and exploratory testing. You can view how your users and related metrics are going in real-time in the table & graphical representations while your tests are running.

Performance Monitoring

You can monitor resource utilization, speed, load time, and other performance-related metrics for your APIs. This is useful for identifying bottlenecks and other performance defects in your APIs.

Statistics Exporting

You can export statistics tables & graphs from SoapUI for your reference.

Setup/TearDown using Groovy Scripting

You can use Groovy to write scripts for the initialization and cleanup of your test cases and mock services.

LoadUI Integration

You can integrate the LoadUI load testing tool (open-source and commercial versions) with SoapUI for extended functionalities.

Load Testing Features Covered by only SoapUI Pro

Now, this is where things get interesting. There are two main features that are vital for collaboration and performance optimization, but they are only found in the paid version. Let’s check them out. 

Reporting

There are many reports that are critical to analyzing your load test results and test cases for correctly identifying the performance issues, bottlenecks, and ways to optimize them. These reports include TestSuite Coverage, TestCase Coverage, Assertion Coverage, Message Recording Coverage, and JUnit Reports. SoapUI Pro allows you to generate and download these reports, which is not the case with SoapUI.

Git Collaboration

SoapUI Pro generates separate XML files when you work in a team with the same project on Git. In the open-source version of SoapUI, everything related to your project will be stored in a single XML file. If you are working with a team, you will have day-to-day troubles with merging on Git. SoapUI Pro saves you from this problem.

Which is Better – SoapUI or SoapUI Pro?

Well, the answer totally depends on the extent of your project, team members, and how you want to use SoapUI. If you want to improve your performance without day-to-day headaches with collaboration and much-needed performance reports, you need to get SoapUI Pro. If you wish to see how your website is performing under load and figure out on your own why the performance is going down, you are good to go with open-source SoapUI.

LoadView: An Alternative to SoapUI Pro

LoadView is a cloud-based load testing tool for testing APIs, web services, web applications, web pages, and streaming media. Let’s take a look at its main features:

• LoadView offers EveryStep Web Recorder to create complex test scripts for different user paths by just point-and-click functionality. The recorder supports more than 40 desktop/mobile browsers and devices, including Chrome, Internet Explorer, Android, iOS, iPhone, Samsung, as well as technologies and frameworks like HTML5, AJAX, PHP, Java, and many more.

• You can generate the load from multiple geo-locations to create the most realistic test scenarios and test your APIs, websites, and applications from specific locations.

• After carrying out load tests, LoadView generates performance reports that you can download and analyze to quickly identify bottlenecks and performance issues and resolve them.

As you can tell, LoadView is a more comprehensive load/stress testing platform for everything from APIs to complex web applications and websites. This makes it one of the best load testing tools available in the market.

Conclusion: SoapUI Pro vs. Open-Source Load TestingAPI load testing is crucial to ensure the performance of your web applications. SoapUI is a good choice for testing your APIs; however, some much-needed features are available with the SoapUI Pro version, which is a bit expensive. LoadView is a cloud-based load testing tool that is not limited to just API load testing but offers extended functionality to test web applications and web pages. When comparing it with SoapUI Pro, LoadView easily comes out as a winner on all fronts, including pricing.  Read a full comparison of the LoadView and SOAPUI solutions.