A modern Apache Bench alternative with a GUI and result history

What Apache Bench is actually good at

Let's start with the honest part. ab is:

• Universally available. It's bundled with Apache HTTPD; on most Linux servers you already have it.
• Tiny. Single binary, almost no config, starts instantly.
• Perfect for a quick smoke test. If you want to know whether an endpoint survives 1000 GETs, ab gives you the answer in seconds.

For many "does this URL still respond?" moments, that's genuinely all you need. Clobbr is not trying to replace ab in those moments.

Where ab falls short

The cracks show as soon as you're doing something slightly more realistic than a single GET on a public endpoint:

• POST with JSON is painful. You set a content type flag, point to a local file with the body, and hope it's encoded the way you expect.
• GraphQL is a second-class citizen. ab doesn't know the difference between a query and a mutation, so your results conflate both.
• Dynamic headers are impossible. Anything that needs a fresh auth token, a signed request, or a computed header is outside ab's model.
• No history. You run a test, you read stdout, you either save it or you don't. Comparing runs over time means rolling your own pipeline.
• No GUI. If you're on a Mac or Windows laptop, just getting ab installed and useful is its own small project.

Feature-by-feature: Clobbr vs Apache Bench

How the two tools stack up on the things people actually hit when load testing something more structured than a homepage GET.

Migrating common ab flags

Here are the common ab invocations and where each flag lands in Clobbr:

• -n (total requests) → iterations field
• -c (concurrent requests) → parallel toggle + concurrency count
• -H (header) → headers editor (plain text or scripted)
• -T (content type) → just set Content-Type in headers
• -p (POST file) → paste the body into the JSON payload editor
• -k (keepalive) → on by default
• -t (time limit) → set a request timeout in advanced settings