A JSONPlaceholder alternative that keeps what you write

JSONPlaceholder is the free fake REST API almost every tutorial reaches for, and deservedly: six resources, no signup, no configuration, and a URL short enough to type from memory. It is close to perfect for the thing it was built for — giving a front-end something to render while the real API does not exist yet.

Where it stops

It accepts POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE and pretends to honour them. The response looks right, complete with a new id, and nothing has changed: fetch the resource afterwards and your write is not there. That is a deliberate design decision for a shared public service, and it is also the point at which it stops being useful for testing rather than prototyping — you cannot verify a create, you cannot test a conflict, and you cannot chain one request into the next.

What is different here

Here, writes persist. Create a character and it is in the collection; delete it and the next GET returns 404. Callers are isolated from one another — by an X-Sandbox-ID header against the live API, and by running the whole engine locally in the browser — which is what makes persistence safe on a public service. Beyond that the surface is much wider: 39 domains rather than 6 resources, real Bearer and JWT auth with a role that gets a 403, ETag and If-Match concurrency, Idempotency-Key replay, rate limits that really limit, webhooks with verifiable HMAC signatures, and every HTTP status code in the catalog reachable on demand.

What JSONPlaceholder does better

• Universally recognised — a JSONPlaceholder URL in a code sample needs no explanation, and it appears in tutorials, courses and StackOverflow answers everywhere.
• A smaller surface to learn: six resources with obvious names, and nothing else to understand.
• Its shape (posts, comments, users, todos) is the canonical example for front-end tutorials, and matches what most sample UIs expect.

What this playground does better

• Writes persist, so a create can be verified and requests can be chained.
• 39 APIs and 337 endpoints across fandoms, business domains and pure protocol exercises.
• Real auth: Bearer tokens with roles, signed JWTs, and complete OAuth 2.0 flows.
• Error paths on demand — 409, 412, 413, 415, 422, 429, 503 — rather than only the happy one.
• OpenAPI 3.1 and Postman exports per API, plus a merged spec for the whole catalog.
• Runs entirely in the browser, so it works with no network and cannot be rate-limited by other people's traffic.

Which to use

Use JSONPlaceholder when you need a body to render and nothing else. Come here when the thing you are testing is the HTTP: the failures, the auth, the concurrency and the retries.

Checked against JSONPlaceholder as of 2026-09.

Other comparisons

• httpbin — httpbin shows you the request. This shows you an API. They answer different questions.
• reqres.in — reqres is a clean, tiny user API with fake auth. The gap is everything past the happy path.
• the free mock API landscape — Six free options, what each is genuinely for, and how to tell which one your problem needs.

All 39 mock REST APIs · Getting started guide · About this playground