Open-source load testing

Whether it's simulating thousands of customers trying to buy tickets to a high demand event, performance testing a critical API endpoint, or generating load against a system behind a firewall —we support the right testing tool for the job.

Protocol vs. Browser

Modern performance testing involves two different approaches: generating load with browsers loading pages, or generating load by simulating network requests. Both approaches are well suited to stress testing, performance testing, and other load testing methodologies.

In the browser-based world, we can eliminate a lot of the complexity which encumbered load testers focussing purely on protocol based tools, including request correlation, session handling, and cookie stores — as the browser automatically handles all these for you.

All open-source tools support scripting on Flood, which is the preferred way to upload a test to our platform. We also offer a scriptless approach to creating API load tests which are built in the browser and executed using JMeter.

Whether your software testing goals are to do stress testing, spike testing, or general performance testing, Flood offers a unified experience across all tools, giving you real-time reporting, APM integrations, and simultaneous deployment across cloud, hosted-cloud, or on-premise.

Browser-based tools

Real browser load testing is a novel and easy to use approach to testing a wide variety of applications by accurately simulating the actions of users interacting with your application.

Flood Element Logo

Our flagship real browser load testing tool is Element, built in-house at Flood and open-sourced, it packs a serious punch in terms of performance, and is often the easiest way to get started.

Element includes its own domain-specific language written in TypeScript, a popular superset of JavaScript, which gives you inline documentation and correctness checking within your editor of choice. Element supports all the same actions as Selenium webdriver, with a few modern additions to reduce test maintenance.

Learn more about Element

Selenium makes it easy to reuse your functional test scripts for non-functional performance testing.

Selenium Webdriver is a wildly popular tool for browser-based regression automation tests, across multiple devices and platforms. On Flood we support Chrome and Firefox based Selenium tests.

Learn more about Selenium

Protocol-based tools

The world of protocol-based load testing tools is vast, with hundreds of open-source options to choose from. At Flood, we've chosen Apache JMeter and Gatling, the two most popular and highest performing tools available.

Apache JMeter is one of the original open-source tools, with an extensive plugin ecosystem, and support for hundreds of network protocols.

Learn more about JMeter

Gatling is a high performing, load testing tool with a programmatic domain-specific language, that lets you specify test scripts in Scala.

This makes Gatling very appealing to developers or testers who prefer to express load tests as code. The real power is Gatling's efficient use of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), with high concurrency and throughput achievable from a single machine.

Learn more about Gatling

We support your cloud

Flood has native support for the top 3 Cloud providers, providing one-click on-demand and hosted load generation. We provide an easy to use launch interface for starting load generators in your own cloud provider account or ours.

Load testing on AWS allows you to bring load tests closer to your customers and your application if you're deployed on AWS.

Load Test on AWS

Deploying Flood Grids on Azure allows to use your existing agreements with Azure to reduce load testing costs when running load generators under your own account.

Load Test on Azure

Google Cloud provides enhanced networking and reduced compute costs, as well as one of the easiest to use management consoles of the major cloud providers.

Load Test on GCP

Using Flood Agent you can deploy Flood load generators on any cloud provider and retain full control of your load generator infrastructure and spend, using Flood as your orchestration and management interface.

DigitalOcean offers dirt cheap compute for developers.

Deploy Agent on DigitalOcean

Get Started For Free

Ready to get started? Create an account and upload your script to Flood.