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OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) vs SmartBear LoadNinja comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

OpenText Professional Perfo...
Ranking in Performance Testing Tools
4th
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SmartBear LoadNinja
Ranking in Performance Testing Tools
14th
Ranking in Load Testing Tools
11th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Performance Testing Tools category, the mindshare of OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) is 12.7%, down from 12.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartBear LoadNinja is 2.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Performance Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional)12.7%
SmartBear LoadNinja2.5%
Other84.8%
Performance Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SD
Assistant Consultant at Tata Consultancy
Experience a decade of seamless performance with robust support
I would like to improve OpenText LoadRunner Professional based on what we discussed in our last discussion, as those points remain similar and applicable. For future updates, I would like to see the same features that people generally prefer. I find that AI functionality in OpenText LoadRunner Professional should be improved and more accessible; if we get a chance to work with that, then we can check how much it helps.
Kapil Tarka - PeerSpot reviewer
Test Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Easy to use with good documentation and helpful support
It's a new tool when I compare it with LoadViewer and HP LoadRunner. It needs time to mature. For example, it needs to improve concurrency. When you run a test suite, your scripts will generate some test data. If we are running a banking application and then we are running a full end-to-end suite, there are many actions that need testing. There's a lot of data getting generated. There should be a variable that we can store for later in our later test cases. We need data management and dynamic data generation to be able to capture the data which is generated.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most important feature for us is that it supports a lot of protocols because we support all of them, including HTTP, FTP, mainframe, and others."
"Graph monitoring is a valuable feature."
"One of the most valuable features of LoadRunner Professional is the wide range of protocols it supports, especially the web user v user types."
"Very useful for finding out how the system responds to load, stress, and normal situations, as well as benchmarking with other industry competitors. It also improved our response time, memory delegation, and CPU delegation. In addition, we used LoadRunner to optimize our database and website."
"It provides clients with an understanding of application and system performance."
"There are various languages that they allow those programs to be written in, whether you want to use Java or something else."
"The ability to do multithreading. That's available in any performance testing tool, but the number of protocols that this particular tool supports has been very good."
"The solution can handle a huge amount of workloads, it's quite scalable."
"It's a very simple tool for performance testing."
"We are happy with the technical support."
"SmartBear LoadNinja is easy to use and implement."
 

Cons

"Improvement wise, the pipeline should be enabled. It should be embedded as part of the tool itself rather than going with third-party tools. Monitoring should be more effective as well."
"I would like to have better support for adding more users per load generator."
"The technical support of Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional could improve. I had an issue with the licensing and their response time is slow. They can improve on this in the future."
"Licensing costs could be reduced."
"Support for Microsoft Dynamics needs improvement."
"The tool needs to work on capture script feature."
"Sometimes when we were migrating from one version to another, some of our scripts started failing."
"If they can make LoadRunner more comprehensive, it would really help."
"It needs time to mature."
"On a smaller scale, there will be no budget issues, but as we expand to a larger user base, I believe we will face some pricing challenges."
"As we ran the test, we couldn't see the real-time results of how the solution behaved for 200 to 400 virtual users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model and the software licensing model could be better."
"The solution's pricing is expensive."
"LoadRunner is more expensive than some competing products."
"It is competing with other products that may cost significantly less or may be available as open-source. Because of that it is relatively expensive."
"The cost depends greatly on the needs of the testing engagement."
"The licensing model is complex. You have to pick up the protocol and the number of concurrent users, and then select the level of concurrent users. For example, there would be one price for 100 to 500 users and another for 500 to 2000 users. If you choose two protocols, then you will have to pay twice the amount depending on the number of concurrent users."
"For licensing, we pay a lot for it. But the incentive is the support we get with it, that we pay once, and we are set."
"OpenText LoadRunner Enterprise's pricing is reasonable."
"Certainly, the cost could be reduced."
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Comparison Review

it_user104961 - PeerSpot reviewer
Penetration and Neoload Tester at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Apr 13, 2014
LoadRunner vs NeoLoad
The six phases of an IT project Enthusiasm Disillusionment Panic Search for the guilty Punishment of the innocent (the performance tester) Praise and rewards for the incompetent non-participants This article has been put together as part of an evaluation of the performance test tools NeoLoad and…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
13%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise66
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?
When designing a workload model offers a good range of possibilities for creating goal-oriented scenarios, which helps us understand and meet SLAs.
What needs improvement with Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional?
I have mentioned many advantages about this product, but to discuss disadvantages or areas that could be improved, I would need to consult with my engineers who are working on it. So far I have not...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Micro Focus LoadRunner Professional, Micro Focus LoadRunner, HPE LoadRunner, LoadRunner
SmartBear LoadComplete
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, GOME, Australian Red Cross Blood Service, RMIT University, Virgin Media
Falafel Software
Find out what your peers are saying about OpenText Professional Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Professional) vs. SmartBear LoadNinja and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,328 professionals have used our research since 2012.