It depends in what way you mean. It generates traffic and measures performance in a similar way as ab/httperf. The biggest difference is that it is an online service, which means you don't need to own any servers yourself to run ab or httperf on. You don't have to install or configure ab/httperf, and you get results nicely formatted as graphs with no extra work on your part and test configurations and results are always available to you, on the web.

If you have the time, knowledge, interest and a server to spare, then ab or httperf (or I would recommend the Grinder - http://grinder.sourceforge.net/ ) is definitely worth a try however.