Rest Assured Vs JMeter

Rest Assured Vs JMeter

Automated testing has become quite important for quality assurance of software. However, it has become rather tricky to test REST APIs. For those who use manual REST API testing, it is possible to overlook details and miss out on ways to save time. As a result, it is important to find the correct tools. Rest Assured and Apache JMeter are two well-known REST tools that can be used to test REST API services.

What is Rest Assured?

Rest Assured is a Java library that provides a Domain Specific Language (DSL) which is used for writing strong RESTful API tests that are maintainable. It is used for testing HTTP-based services. REST services in Java are difficult to test and validate unlike dynamic languages like Groovy or Ruby. As such, Rest Assured is used for simplifying the tests of services that are REST based. It is a highly popular library used for API test automation in a lot of companies. It supports GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, and PATCH requests and can be used to validating as well as verifying the response of all these requests. Rest Assured comes with a number of baked-in functionalities so that users do not have to create it by scratch.

What is JMeter?

Apache JMeter is a free open-source Java software that can be used to test functional behavior as well as to measure the performance of web applications and other services. It is well-known for load and performance testing. It is also a very powerful tool for API testing. It can be used to create test fragments that can be reused in other suites. It can also be used for both static and dynamic resources performance testing. It also allows users to replay the test results. JMeters resembles a browser or multiple browsers but it does not support all the actions of a browser.

Comparison of Rest Assured Vs JMeter

Ease of Setting Up

To be able to use either Rest Assured or JMeter, it is important to install Java first. It is quite easy to install JMeter as you simply have to go to the download page, select the zip or tar file, download the archive, unzip it and you are set to go. The way to install Rest Assured is a bit different. Unlike JMeter, Rest Assured is not a standalone tool. To use it, a new Java project has to be set up as a library for the project.  In order to do a basic test using Apache JMeter, it is not necessary for one to have coding skills but it is good to have some basic concepts of programming like variables, conditions, loops, etc.

Automated REST Test Creation and Maintenance

JMeter also comes with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which lets you perform tests using the GUI. Whereas, for Rest Assured, it is necessary to have Java coding skills to perform tests. Unlike JMeter, it does not have a user-friendly GUI to create tests.
In order to collaborate with others on the same JMeter file, it is not easy to maintain the large XML file using any Source Control Management (SCM) systems like Git, Perforce or SVN. However, with Rest Assured, collaboration is more simple as it is easy to maintain the Java files using SCM.

Report Types

JMeter has a lot of report types which can be created from the test results. On the other hand, Rest Assured does not create reports. However, when it is integrated with other testing frameworks, it is possible to receive usable reports in the form of HTML, text or XML formats.
JMeter is notable as a performance test tool for testing web apps as well as services. Out of the box, it offers various reporting options with many types of charts for showing the performance metrics. In the matter of performance testing, Rest Assured does not support it out of the box. Instead, one would have to build a custom framework for performance testing.

Community Activity

Apache JMeter has a large community and is used as an industry standard for testing the performance of web applications and services. This may be mainly because it has been out in the market for a longer time as compared to Rest Assured. Rest Assured is also making its way to become a primary choice and is recommended from various sources in terms of automating REST API functional tests.
JMeter publishes official release every 5-6 months while Rest Assured does so every 6 months.  JMeter’s repository is very active with new commits on a regular basis. While Rest Assured is relatively less active, the GitHub repository has a lot of contributors. There are over 23,000 results for JMeter in StackOverflow and over 2,000 results for Rest Assured.