You'll probably get lots of JMeter fans on this this list and just as much enthusiasm for SoapUI on some other forum.
Our organization uses both tools fairly enthusiastically. Where I find JMeter to be superior is in *functional integration testing* because of the multi protocol capabilities. I can do anything I want over HTTP with (SOAP/XML WS, JSON, whatever) and then make a JDBC connection or LDAP search in the next step with rich assertions at every turn. Same goes for the general flexibility of the scripting tools. If I am dealing with a JSON response from a service call, I can use a JavaScript postprocessor to do JSON.parse() on the response text. Similarly, if I want to do something fancy with an XML response, I can fire up a JRUBY script in a JSR-223 component and use REXML to parse XML with unlimited flexibility. Much of this approach would make no sense if one was putting a multithreaded load test together (read: slow). But from a single threaded, functional test perspective, it is very powerful. Just to round out the story, we drive our JMeter functional tests on a schedule using Jenkins and parse jtl xml results with Performance Plugin. Building upon this stylesheet [http://shanhe.me/node/18/314] we use ant to run xslt transforms and publish test results. It's been very successful. Part of what I observe with the SoapUI / JMeter comparison is that the SoapUI gui leaves people with the impression that it is more modern / fancy (and that the plain Swing UI in JMeter has the opposite effect). It's just good to be aware of this and drive the conversation beyond the tool UI towards specific evaluation of each tool's support of your actual goals. Mark
