About a year and a half ago, at mid of 2012, I gave a talk in the Israeli QA Conference and part of the session was about the increasing popularity of JMeter (and the decrease of popularity of the old leader - HP Load Runner). Back then I said that I expect that by the end of 2012 the most popular performance testing tool will be JMeter ().
Well, it seems I was right. It happened even faster!
Looking at the job posts popularity by keywords, the are more job opening now with JMeter, than with Load Runner, actually since mid of 2012.
(looking back at the presentation from that time, at mid 2012, I only had figures from January 2012 which showed this about to happen, while in fact - it already did)
As I am trying to be active on the JMeter users list, as well as monitoring the developers list I see this is not out of the blue - the maintainers are doing excellent work with new important features, bug fixes, new technologies adoption and so on... Also taking seriously community comments and change requests.
One of the best things about the JMeter users list is not only that it is being used for discussion about the tool but it also a place to discuss about methodologies, best practices and how-to's, regarding proper load testing, integration with continuous delivery and other conceptual topics.
Aside of the properly maintained project in Apache, there are other projects, both free open source and commercial, which complement the tool, including the most popular free open source and must have JMeter Plugins project (fka JP@GC, which went crazy bigger over the last 6 months with merging of other smaller jmeter plugins projects) and the commercial Ubik Load Pack (Which I must admit, I have never used).
There are also JMeter cloud services like Blazemeter.com, flood.io (fka gridinit.com) and beatsoo.org.
Two important notes I have with the trending of popularity:
Well, it seems I was right. It happened even faster!
Looking at the job posts popularity by keywords, the are more job opening now with JMeter, than with Load Runner, actually since mid of 2012.
(looking back at the presentation from that time, at mid 2012, I only had figures from January 2012 which showed this about to happen, while in fact - it already did)
As I am trying to be active on the JMeter users list, as well as monitoring the developers list I see this is not out of the blue - the maintainers are doing excellent work with new important features, bug fixes, new technologies adoption and so on... Also taking seriously community comments and change requests.
One of the best things about the JMeter users list is not only that it is being used for discussion about the tool but it also a place to discuss about methodologies, best practices and how-to's, regarding proper load testing, integration with continuous delivery and other conceptual topics.
Aside of the properly maintained project in Apache, there are other projects, both free open source and commercial, which complement the tool, including the most popular free open source and must have JMeter Plugins project (fka JP@GC, which went crazy bigger over the last 6 months with merging of other smaller jmeter plugins projects) and the commercial Ubik Load Pack (Which I must admit, I have never used).
There are also JMeter cloud services like Blazemeter.com, flood.io (fka gridinit.com) and beatsoo.org.
Two important notes I have with the trending of popularity:
- The popularity growth of JMeter seems to be on hold over the last couple of years.
I am unsure if that's because there's another 3rd major player I am not familiar with or it is that the human kind found another solution where performance testing is not required. It might also be related with the overall job openings in the USA (where this graph is based upon) which feels to me like the most likely. It is also known that over bad financial times, the "fats" are cut off, so quality is something easier to cut, than developers who actually develop software. Time will tell. - The second important note is that the comparison between load runner and jmeter is incorrect, as the comparison should have been with the term "loadrunner" and not "load runner". Seems like the right term (or the more popular term) is non-spaced "loadrunner":
So overall loadrunner is still more popular (especially if you sum it with "load runner" job openings), but the shrinking trend with the popularity of Load Runner cannot be ignored.
Let's see how it looks like in few months.
