10 best open source web testing tools

Web testing is the kind of software testing focusing on web applications.  Such testing will help to identify errors/bugs before the website is live/visible to public.  Today there are many open source testing tools that are easily available.  Here are a few list of testing tools which will give you an insight on the usage and purpose.

JMeter – Load and Performance tester
JMeter is a pure Java desktop application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types.

Grinder – Java Load Testing Framework
The Grinder is a Java load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines. Load test anything that has a Java API. This includes common cases such as HTTP web servers, SOAP and REST web services, and application servers (CORBA, RMI, JMS, EJBs), as well as custom protocols.

Multi-Mechanize – web performance and load testing framework
Multi-Mechanize is an framework for web performance and load testing. It allows you to run simultaneous python scripts to generate load (synthetic transactions) against a web site or web service. You programmatically create test scripts to simulate virtual user activity. Your scripts will then generate HTTP requests to intelligently navigate a web site or send requests to a web service.

Selenium – Web app testing tool
Selenium is a suite of tools such as Selenium IDE, Selenium Remote Control and Selenium Grid to test the web application. Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. It supports record and playback.

Capybara – Acceptance test framework for web applications
Capybara aims to simplify the process of integration testing Rack applications such as Rails, Sinatra or Merb. Capybara simulates how a real user would interact with a web application. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and currently comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. HtmlUnit and env.js are supported through external gems.

OpenSTA – Open Systems Testing Architecture
OpenSTA is a distributed software testing architecture designed around CORBA. The current toolset has the capability of performing scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms. Results and statistics are collected during test runs by a variety of automatic and user controlled mechanisms. These can include scripted timers, SNMP data, Windows Performance Monitor stats and HTTP results & timings.

Pylot – Performance & Scalability Testing of Web Services
Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning. Pylot generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests), verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI or shell/console.
It supports HTTP and HTTPS. It is multi-threaded and generates real time stats. Response is verified with regular expressions. GUI and Console mode support available.

WebLoad – The best LoadRunner Alternative
The WebLOAD Open Source Load Generation Engine is an open source project sponsored by RadView Software. This project is intended for ISVs, SIs and software developers who need to integrate a professional load generation engine into their applications.

Webrat – Ruby Acceptance Testing for Web applications
Webrat helps to write expressive and robust acceptance tests for a Ruby web application. It supports multiple Ruby web frameworks like Rails, Merb and Sinatra. It also supports popular test frameworks like RSpec, Cucumber, Test::Unit and Shoulda.

Windmill – Web Testing Tool
Windmill is a web testing tool designed to automate and debug your web application. It provides cross-browser test recorder. It has built-in shell to interact with WIndmill server. Write and run tests from Python, Ruby and Javascript.