RandomUser vs Snowfakery

RandomUser is a free, open-source API that generates synthetic user records for application testing. Results are available as JSON, PrettyJSON, CSV, YAML, or XML, with fields including names, locations, emails, login details, birth and registration information, phone numbers, photos, and nationality. Requests can filter by gender or nationality, set a seed, paginate results, and include or exclude fields. Password generation supports selectable character sets and configurable length, with a default range of 8–64 characters. The API uses its latest version by default, while callers can request a specific version such as 1.4. Documentation demonstrates browser requests with AJAX and jQuery. The service is available through both web and API access, with up to 5,000 generated users per request. A free Photoshop extension has a CC 2017 limitation, and the Sketch extension remains in development.

Snowfakery generates synthetic data from YAML recipe files, including records linked across tables. Recipes can create names, addresses, text, URLs, random numbers and other values using Faker-based functions, and specify how many related objects to generate. Output can go to files in JSON, TXT, CSV, SQL, DOT, SVG, SVGZ, JPEG and PostScript formats; some diagram formats require Graphviz. Snowfakery can also write to databases accessible through SQLAlchemy, including SQLite, and generate records in Salesforce when used through CumulusCI. Python applications can embed it with its generate_data function, and Python plugins and providers can extend its functions and Faker capabilities. Strict mode checks a recipe before generation, while validate-only mode checks it without generating data. It is free, open source and self-hosted. The documentation says database output creates new tables, with generated columns as text, and that SQLite is the only database included in its SQL dataset URL test suite. The repository was archived on September 18, 2026, and is read-only.