We used Micro Focus Performance Center and BlazeMeter.

We switched because we had a client who was heavily on Akamai. So, the client opted for Akamai because the security model was enabled. They got a very good offer with bundling based on the solution, and CloudTest was part of that particular bundle.

Apart from that, Performance Center requires a lot of resource capacity versus that for CloudTest. So, in comparison to Performance Center, which was on-premises, CloudTest is more on the easy side because the entire solution is on the cloud. You need not worry about maintaining low instances. That's another reason why we switched because we really wanted to get away from the maintenance effort.

Yet another reason has to do with skillsets. I believe for Performance Center or BlazeMeter, you need Java as your core development skill, if you really want to customize your scripts. However, for CloudTest you need JavaScript, and JavaScript is quicker and easier to learn and be hands on.

We looked at a couple of other applications like Apache JMeter, Gatling, and a few other low-cost open-sourced applications, but with those applications, you need to have a complete setup or complete integration in the backend. The scalability becomes a problem and that is why we didn't choose them. These solutions also didn't give us a real user experience and parameter tweaking with open-source was not possible. With Akamai CloudTest all of this is quite easy and possible to perform.

We did previously use a different solution. It was the client's decision to switch to Akamai Cloudtest.

The solution used by my employer was JMeter, mainly because it is open-sourced and a lot of engineers already used it or know how to use it. I found CloudTest to be a solid alternative with a more intuitive design. Use of Amazon cloud is also a strong-point as I see more and more products using the cloud. I sure hope to have the change of using CloudTest more often on one of my projects.