Comparison with HPE Performance Center

Hi,

I did not use HPE, so will not provide any comparison... :)

As for LoadComplete and LoadUI: LoadUI (Pro) is not supported for several years already and evolved to LoadUI NG which is a part of the Ready! API platform. Though I do not think that its concept changed since old regular LoadUI. So, as it was mentioned in another thread (https://community.smartbear.com/t5/LoadComplete/LoadComplete/td-p/142862), LoadComplete is a load testing tool to emulate the load from regular human users. I.e. LoadComplete records the http(s) traffic from the browser (or application that generates http(s) traffic) and replays it then.

LoadUI is a tool that is primarily intended to generate a load using SoapUI tests. SoapUI is a tool to perform API testing. I.e. it does not record the traffic, but instead makes it possible to call API functions exposed by the tested web service and verify obtained responses. LoadUI makes it possible to load the tested web service using SoapUI tests as a load source.

So, if you need to (load) test an API - use SoapUI NG (with LoadUI NG). If you need to emulate the load from end-users - use LoadComplete.

LoadComplete is documented extremely well and you should be able to find detailed answers on your questions in the documentation available at https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/78471/.

Documentation for SoapUI and LoadUI is available at https://support.smartbear.com/readyapi/docs/index.html.

Important note about scripting: while SoapUI supports scripting, both LoadUI and LoadComplete support parameterization but not scripting. It is my understanding that it was done for purpose because of performance considerations and scripting, actually, is not needed for load testing. One must clearly understand the difference between functional testing and load testing. The functional testing assumes some logic and conditional test branching and verification, so scripting is needed. Load testing, on the contrary, assumes execution of some certain scenario, but from a lot of users. Thus load testing needs parameterization, but scripting is not needed. If scenario branches, then two separate scenarios must be created and executed in load testing.