What is a Web Service?
A Web service or API (Application programming interface) is a client-server application component for the communication purposes between machine to machine over the worldwide web. Its software functionality provides a method of communication between two devices over the network. This software system comprises of standards or protocols for exchanging information between any two devices or application by the use of web technology like HTTP for making the communication between two devices or applications possible. A web service is a language independent way of communication based on the request-response method. The transfer of communications is mostly in XML and JSON formats.
Some of the applications that can communicate to other application through the use of web service over a network are; Java, .net, and PHP applications. There are mainly two protocols for the implementation of web services, namely, SOAP (Simple object access protocol) and REST (Representation State Transfer) that drives the communication of data and information over internet protocol.
Concept of Web Service Testing
The fact that web services are exposed to the web and are distributed over different networks, makes them vulnerable to risks and security threats that directly affects the processes based on them. Thereby, it is necessary to do the web services testing in order to ensure they perform or interact securely and respond to the queries correctly.
There are various commercial and open sourcing testing tools available in the market to test performance, connectivity and response of web services.
The web services testing tools are designated with automated testing for specific scenario such as functional testing, performance testing, load testing and much more.
For your convenience, this article seeks to provide you with a list of top 25 web services testing tools; both open source and commercial that will meet most of your requirements. Let us check out the main features of these testing tools:
1. SoapUI
SoapUI is the most popular and a free web services for testing tool which supports standards and protocols to simulate behavior of web services. The web services testing with SoapUI software tool allows users to testing of both REST and SOAP APIs with ease.
- It allows quick and easy test creation and assertions with its point and click and drag and drop features that makes complicated tasks like working with JSON and XML simple.
- It provides you with powerful data drives testing by loading data from excel, files and databases to simulate the way consumers interact with your APIs.
2. TestingWhiz
TestingWhiz is a codeless automated web services testing tool that lets you perform functional, load testing and mocking of SOAP an REST APIs via WSDL interface over HTTP and FTP.
- It lets you perform: a) end-to-end codeless testing right for Web UI, business logic, database and ETL. b) Service denial and penetration checks to ensure the performance of APIs.
- TestingWhiz allows distributed and parallel execution across multiples machines and devices. Further, it provides you continuous integration with Jenkins, Bamboo and Hudson.
3. SOAPSonar
SOAPSonar is a diagnostic platform for web services testing of HTML, SOAP, XML, REST and JSON. It allows rapid testing along with detecting any vulnerability like Malware Threat and SQL injection in web services.
- It provides functional, automation, performance, reporting, compliance and load testing with out-of-the-box for OASIS and W3C standards.
- It allows easy set up of test cases and lets you perform scalability and robustness testing of web services. It quickly figures out and report any interoperability issues that occurs while loading WSDL.
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4. SOAtest
Parasoft SOAtest automates the complete testing of web services and web applications and provides robust support for RESTful web services testing tool. SOAtest comes with an intuitive interface and provides end-to-end testing capability.
- It efficiently transforms your functional testing artifacts into security and load testing. This helps in increasing the re-usability and save time with building a foundation of automates tests to be executed as part of continuous integration.
- It allows service virtualization and multi-layer validation. It supports around 120+ protocols, platforms and message types and allows you to create sophisticated, extensible and reusable tests without coding.
5. TestMaker
TestMaker supports web services testing for SOAP and REST. It is among the popular software tool providing free web services for testing with its intuitive features. This software works on Pushto test methodology and offers and easy migration. It executes tests on grid and cloud.
- It is an open source software tool that monitors performance and functional issues in web services and SOA application by Pushto Test.
- This software tool can repurpose Selenium tests, SoapUI tests, Sahi Tests or any tests written in Groovy, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby and Perl into functional, performance and load tests.
6. Postman
Postman is a powerful yet intuitive GUI based application tool that can test HTTP/REST web services. It is free testing tool that quickens up API testing services for the convenience of users and supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome platforms.
- Its user-friendly interface allows users to write Boolean tests. It also lets you create a collection of REST calls and save each call as part of a collection for execution in future.
- It is a reliable tool for transmission and receiving REST information. Additionally, it is not a command-line based tool which makes Postman hassle-free test creation with pasting text feature into command line window.
7. vRest
vRest is the recommended tool for automate testing, mocking, automated recording and specification of web services like HTTP/REST/RESTful. It provides an exhaustive tool with online solution to validate your REST web services.
- It requires no skilled resources to validate web application and takes let testing effort, yet delivers zero defect web application in API testing.
- vRest provides for mock server functionality and generates documentation for your API specifications. This tool is designed exclusively for testing, mocking and validation of REST APIs and web services.
8. HttpMaster
HttpMaster provides advanced support for codeless APIs testing and is an exclusive tool for REST web services testing. It comes with an easy-to-use responsive user interface that does not require advanced technical skills.
- HttpMaster allows storing of all information like API calls and project data at a single place. It utilizes automated command-line interface for the test creation and execution.
- The easy test management features provides for different validation types and advanced expressions to ease testing. It uses several HTTP methods such as GET, POST, DELETE etc.
9. Runscope
Runscope is a simple to use tool that tests and monitors the performances of web services and is very helpful in determining of the API breaks anywhere. It is a popular tool for web services testing and is employed by many of the big companies including Adobe and Samsung.
- It checks for the performance and provides complete report about the overall health of the API. Further, it allows you to reuse and execute tests across multiple locations.
- This tool displays visually rich metrics and analytics to identify problems. It provides integration with tools like HipChat, Webhooks, Slack and PagerDuty to verify whether the API returns the correct data and prompts when the APIs are down.
10. Rapise
Rapise is a powerful automation tool that provides easy testing for web services with its flexible and extensible features. It can test desktop, mobile and web applications.
- This tool comes with robust, integrated reporting capabilities and supports almost all the technologies, platforms and device types.
- Rapise is based on an open with flexible architecture for rapid functional testing of SOAP and REST APIs. It uses HTTP standard methods such as POST, GET, PUT and DELETE.
11. LoadUI NG Pro
LoadUI NG Pro tool facilitates the load testing of SOAP and REST based web services. It provides for quick and real-time load testing of APIs. It can spin up massive API load tests quickly.
- It enables you to reuse your functional API tests built on the open-source based web services testing with SoapUI for speed testing. It helps you by reducing the time it takes you to deploy high performance REST and SOAP web services.
- LoadUI Pro does not require a background for load testing and allows creation and execution of tests by anyone. Also, it does not require scripting and guides users to build a realistic performance test scenarios.
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12. STORM
STORM is an open source tool by CodePlex for testing web services written using any technology including Java or .NET. Currently, STORM only supports SOAP web service. This tool is scripted mostly in F# language
- This tool allows testing multiple web services from a single user interface. This free web service testing tool lowers the testing costs for users that make it perfect than other APIs testing tools.
- It dynamically invokes web service methods and even those that have complex data types input parameters. It saves your development time and money as in STORM does not require creating throw-away test client apps just to test the web services.
13. WebInject
WebInject is a free web service testing tool that is helpful in automated testing of web services or web applications. This free tool provides for automated functional, acceptance, and regression testing of web services or web applications.
- The tool is a command-line tool and is based on Perl, which simplifies the execution of tests since it doesn’t require one to spend time at the command prompt. It can run on platforms that have Perl interpreter.
- WebInject offers integration with other test application and system as a plugin for external monitoring and provides real-time display of tests results.
14. Apache Jmeter
Apache Jmeter application is open source software that helps in performance of API testing and is used for functional load testing of SOAP and REST web services. Jmeter is a 100% pure Java application designed to load test functional behavior.
- Jmeter helps in measuring and boosting the performance of API testing. It can test performance both on static and dynamic resources, Web dynamic applications.
- It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, group of servers, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types.
15. Stylus Studio
Stylus studio is an ideal and powerful web services tool for testing web services. It provides a web service call composer that acts as a web service tester.
- Stylus Studio makes it easy to invoke web service method. Web service methods can be easily located, inspected and invoked through XML IDE.
- It is an ideal Web services tool for testing Web services, inspecting WSDL files, generating SOAP envelopes, and automating or accelerating many other common XML development tasks encountered when developing Web service enabled applications.
16. WizdlW
WizdlW is open source based web services tool that allows testing of web services with its .NET utility, scripted in C#.
- It permits rapid and quick import of web services and their testing within the comfort of a Windows forms GUI.
- WizdlW supports calling complex web services that take arrays and deeply nested objects as parameters.
17. Ping-API
Ping-API is API testing tool that is designed for automated API testing and monitoring. This software tool is available for free trial online.
- Ping-API schedules your test in every minutes or hour. It allows you to test your APIs through test script writing in JavaScript and CoffeeScript.
- It allows inspecting HTTP API call with a complete request and response data. In the case of any break or failure in API, users gets a notification via email, slack or Hipchat.
18. Karate DSL
Karate DSL is a newly designed API testing framework based on cucumber library. It allows test execution and report generation just like any standard Java project.
- Currently, Karate is the only open source tool that helps to combine API test automation, mocking, performance testing and even user interface automation into a single and unified test framework.
- The Karate DSL API testing tool makes it possible to write tests even for the non-programmers. It allows re-use of payload-data and user-defined functions across tests.
19. Rest Console
Rest Console is an HTTP request visualizer and constructor API testing tool that helps developers to build, debug and test RESTful APIS.
- Rest Console has a customisable interface that allows construct POST or PUT body via raw input.
- The tool offers easy query parameters creation. Further, it adds custom headers through intuitive user interface.
20. Hippie Swagger
Hippie-swagger is a recommended tool for testing Restful APIs. It supports clear assertion syntax, for extending test behavior and allows clean printing reports.
- Besides the feature of this tool to validate API behavior, it will fail tests whenever swagger documentation is either inaccurate or missing. This ensures its accurate application behavior, keeping documentation in sync with reality.
- When the tool detects that it is interacting with any app that is not specified as in the swagger file, it will throw an error and fails the test. The idea is to use is core features to write API tests as per usual, and hippie-swagger will only interject if the swagger contract is violated.
21. PyRestTest
PyRestTest is a python based REST API testing platform with extensive functionality that goes beyond than just checking the correct behavior or performance of REST web services.
- It does not need code to run tests as the tool supports tests in JSON or YAML configuration files. It further offers to generate, extract and validate mechanisms to build test scenarios.
- The tool requires minimal dependencies which allow easy deployment on-server for smoke tests and health checks.
22. Apigee
Apigee is a cross-cloud API testing tool that provides you with the ability to monetize your APIs. It offers free APIs for the developers to first try them out.
- Apigee builds and delivers modern application fast to provide users with connected experiences. Its operation efficiency is quite impressive as it execute faster at scale and optimize costs as well.
- It allows you to measure and test API performance, supports and builds API using other editors like Swagger. It offers security and governance policies across all APIs.
23. API Science
API Science provides top API monitoring services. It offers monitoring the health, availability, and performance of web APIs. API Science lets you know in case of any failure or break down of API.
- The tool is multi-step and powered by JavaScript. It helps you to manage the API supply chain.
- It enables monitoring Private, Partner and Public APIs. It powerful reporting mechanisms allow you to get insight into historical trends and identify future issues.
24. Apiary Inspector
Apiary is an API tool that provides free web services for testing. It allows the user to write API blueprints and lets the user view them Apiary editor or Apiary.jo.
- Apiary provides a Mock Server for you to monitor your API during the design phase. To aid in this, an API Inspector is provided that captures both the requests and responses and allows you to view them.
- The tool has role-based access control over the API documents and offers you to add and remove team members from API design projects
25. Airborne
Airborne is an API automation RESTful web services testing tool. It uses rest client to make the HTTP request and supports all HTTP verbs.
- Airborne web services testing tool is a programming framework. Hence, it has no user interface apart from the text file to create code.
- It allows call of the methods such as (Get, Post, Put, Patch, Delete, Head and Options) for creating a test. This allows you access to Response, Headers, Body and Json_Body.
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