Jmeter alternative

Try Grinder, it's reasonably simple to use, and can be scripted.

Try FunkLoad, a functional and performance testing tool for web apps, written in Python.

Use Apache Benchmark (ab). It's a command line tool that ships with apache web server. If you're running *nix, chances are it's already installed on your machine. For example, if you want to send 1000 requests to a web server running on localhost using 10 concurrent threads you would do this:

$ ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://localhost/

It'll spit out a nice report giving you interesting stats such as requests per second, number of failures, and much more.

Maybe you could try Gatling .

It provides a GUI, recorders, reports (response time distribution, requests per second over time,..),...

I think that the biggest difference between gatling and jmeter is that gatling does not use 1 thread for 1 user, but uses async IO. It could be interesting if you have performance issues whith jmeter (and if you cannot use jmeter in a distributed mode)