Apache JMeter and Locust are two of the most well-known and popular performance testing tools used by developers in the IT community and by different companies. In this article we will provide a side by side comparison of JMeter and Locust, by covering the most important aspects of these frameworks. This will help you determine which tool is better for your unique performance test case and for different specific load testing cases.

Now let’s get started

1. JMeter and Locust - An Introduction
JMeter is one of the most solidly proven performance frameworks, with its first version released almost 20 years ago. It is written in pure Java language, and has an elaborate versions history. Initially, JMeter was developed to perform load testing of Web and FTP applications. However, nowadays it allows testing almost any application and protocol, enabling users to create tests by using a desktop application that is compatible with any OS platform.

Locust, on the other hand, is a relatively fresh performance framework written on Python, widely known for the past five years. The main feature of this framework is that it allows you to write performance scripts in pure Python. In addition to its “test as code” feature, Locust is highly scalable due to its fully event-based implementation. Because of these facts, Locust has a wide and fast-growing community, who prefer this framework over JMeter.

2. Open Source License
The question of a tool’s license scope is one of the most important ones, because you would want to know if you would need to pay for additional 3rd party tools to complete your load test. If a tool is open source, you can achieve almost any goal you set for your performance tests without any additional payments. Open source JMeter and Locust are no exception.

Both JMeter and Locust provide a permissive software license which enables free software with minimal requirements about how this software can be distributed. JMeter was developed by Apache and it is based on the Apache License 2.0, while Locust was development by a small team of community-driven developers and is based on the MIT license. In both cases, these tools are open source and allow you to use them freely without any limitations regarding usage.

3. Load Test Creation And Maintenance
There are three main steps in a performance test workflow: create, run and analyze. It's not a secret that usually, the first step is the most time-consuming. There might be different exceptions to this rule but if your application is written well, you should not spend more time on running the tests and analyzing the results than on tests creation. That’s why this step is very important for our comparison. Because being …