What is Gatling.io, the popular open-source load testing tool?
Performance testing is an umbrella term for a broad range of tests that evaluate a system's overall speed, stability, scalability, and resource usage. Load testing, in contrast, is a specific type of performance testing focused solely on measuring system behavior under a particular, expected amount of user traffic or workload.
Basically...
- Performance Testing: Goes deeper to analyze bottlenecks, measure response times, and validate scalability.
- Load Testing: Simulates thousands of concurrent users to check system behavior under heavy traffic.
Gatling.io is both a load testing and performance testing tool, functioning as a comprehensive framework to simulate user traffic, identify bottlenecks, and assess system performance under various conditions, with a strong emphasis on developer-friendly, code-based scripting for web apps, APIs, and microservices.
Gatling.io is a popular, open-source load testing platform and offers both a free Community Edition and an advanced Enterprise version.
Brief Comparison to Apache JMeter
I am neither an expert in Gatling.io nor Apache JMeter, but have used both of them for isolated testing. For reference, Apache JMeter was created in 1998 and Gatling.io in 2011.
| Gatling | Apache JMeter | |
| Performance | ✔ High performance: Asynchronous architecture uses fewer resources for high concurrency | ✘ Resource intensive: Thread-based architecture can use more CPU/memory |
| GUI | ✘ No built-in GUI: Test creation is code-based | ✘ GUI Lock-in: Script changes often require opening the UI |
| CI/CD | ✔ CI/CD Friendly: Built for modern pipelines; better source control integration | ✘ Less CI/CD Friendly: GUI dependency makes source control and automation harder |
| Reporting | ✔ Clear Reporting: Generates detailed, readable HTML reports | |
| Plugins | ✔ Massive Plugin Ecosystem: Huge number of available plugins |
Check out my next blog post on Installing and running Gatling.io.