One of our most commonly-asked questions is: "What are the best tools for load testing?" The answer will depend on a few things: your reason for load testing, the application you want to test, what kind of load testing you want to carry out, your team's experience with scripting, and how many virtual users you want to run.
Note from Nicole: In this video, I say that traditional load testing tools can't simulate requests that are triggered by interactions on the client-side. This isn't technically true: if you know what the requests are, you can build those requests manually on a protocol-level tool (like JMeter or Gatling). However, this takes more work compared to browser-level tools that just do this natively.