SWAPI, the Star Wars API, is a long-standing free REST API with data about the films' people, planets, starships, vehicles, species and films, linked to one another by URL. It is a classic teaching API for fetching JSON and following links between resources, and several community mirrors keep it available.
At a glance
SWAPI compared with this playground, checked 2026-09.
SWAPI
Fun API Playground
Data
Film data about people, planets, starships and more
Small, invented, fan-made data
Methods
GET only
GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
Auth
None
Bearer tokens with roles
Failure modes
Mostly 404
400, 401, 403, 404, 412 and more
Best for
Learning to read and follow an API
Learning to test one
Where it stops
It is read-only, so there is nothing to create, edit or delete and no failure mode beyond a 404 for a missing id. That makes it good for learning to read an API and limited for learning to test one — auth, conflicts and validation never come up.
What is different here
The Star Wars API here is unofficial, fan-made and smaller, with invented data, and it supports the full set of operations: add and update characters (with If-Match), delete them as an admin, page and filter by affiliation, with a sandbox per caller so your changes are yours alone.
What SWAPI does better
Canon data from the films, linked between resources.
A classic, widely documented teaching API with community mirrors and client libraries.
Linked resources by URL, good for learning hypermedia-style navigation.
What this playground does better
Writes that persist in your sandbox: create, update and delete.
Auth with roles, optimistic concurrency and validation failures to test.
Interactive docs, generated code in nine languages and OpenAPI exports.
Part of a 39-API catalog with guides and challenges.
Which to use
Use SWAPI to learn to read an API with data from the films. Use this to practise testing one — it is unofficial, and its data is invented on purpose.
Checked against SWAPI as of 2026-09.
Other comparisons
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