A reqres alternative with more than users and a login

reqres.in is a small hosted REST API — a paginated list of users, a couple of resource collections, register and login endpoints that hand back a token, and a delay parameter for testing spinners. Its virtue is how quickly it can be understood: the whole surface fits on one page, and the pagination is correct enough to build a real list view against.

Where it stops

Its writes are not persisted, its tokens are not real credentials that anything verifies, and its error surface is a handful of cases rather than a system. For a UI demo that needs a plausible user list and a login screen, that is plenty. For testing what your client does when a token expires halfway through a suite, or when two writes collide, there is nothing there to test against.

What is different here

The auth here is the part that differs most. `POST /auth/v1/login` issues a genuinely signed JWT with real claims and a real expiry; the OAuth 2.0 endpoints run authorization-code, client-credentials and refresh-token flows properly, so a token can be obtained, used, expired and refreshed within one test run. Role separation is real too: the viewer token succeeds on reads and returns 403 on a DELETE, which is the case most auth tests never cover.

What reqres.in does better

• Very small and immediately comprehensible — you can hold the entire API in your head.
• A built-in delay parameter that makes loading states easy to demonstrate.
• A user-list shape that drops straight into most tutorial UIs.

What this playground does better

• JWTs that are actually signed and actually expire, and OAuth flows that actually complete.
• Role-based access with a genuine 403, not just a 401 for a missing token.
• Writes that persist for the duration of your sandbox, so requests can be chained.
• Pagination in both page-number and cursor form, with the edge cases that break clients.
• 39 domains instead of one, so the data is not the thing you are concentrating on.

Which to use

reqres is the better choice for a quick UI mock-up with a login screen. This is the better choice once the auth behaviour itself is what you are testing.

Checked against reqres.in as of 2026-09.

Other comparisons

• JSONPlaceholder — JSONPlaceholder fakes its writes. If you need a POST that a later GET can find, that is the difference.
• httpbin — httpbin shows you the request. This shows you an API. They answer different questions.
• the free mock API landscape — Six free options, what each is genuinely for, and how to tell which one your problem needs.

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