JSONPlaceholder vs RandomUser

JSONPlaceholder is one of the longest-running free fake REST APIs, serving a fixed set of 100 posts, 500 comments, 10 users, 100 albums, 5,000 photos, and 200 todos as JSON. Every standard verb works against each resource, including nested routes like /posts/1/comments, though POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE only simulate a write and return a fake response without persisting any change. Its data and IDs never change, which is exactly why it's the default backend in countless framework tutorials and testing guides.

RandomUser (the Random User Generator) is a free, open-source API that returns one or more fully-formed fake user profiles — name, address, email, login credentials, and photo — as JSON, XML, CSV, or YAML depending on the format query parameter. Requests can be tuned with parameters for results count, gender, nationality, and a seed value that makes the "random" output reproducible across calls. It has no authentication and no key-based rate limit, making it a common stand-in for Lorem Ipsum-style placeholder people in demos and test fixtures.