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Best Websites for Practicing Test Automation and Playwright

The best demo websites to practice Playwright test automation, plus Selenium and Cypress: sites for frames, shadow DOM, real app workflows, and API testing.

Updated

These are the demo websites I recommend for practicing Playwright test automation, and they work just as well for Selenium, Cypress, WebDriverIO, or Nightwatch. They cover the scenarios that are hard to practice on your day job: frames, shadow DOM, flaky load timing, multi-step app workflows, and APIs that need auth tokens.

Test Automation Practice Websites at a Glance

SiteBest forType
The InternetHard-to-automate edge cases: frames, shadow DOM, new windows, file uploadUI
Automation ExerciseBeginners: e-commerce store with written test cases to followUI + API
LetCodeBeginners: one web element at a time (inputs, tables, alerts, calendars)UI
UI Testing PlaygroundTiming and dynamic element edge casesUI
SauceDemoLogin and cart flows with different user behaviorsUI
OrangeHRMA complete, realistic business appUI
ParaBankRealistic banking workflowsUI
GlobalsQA BankingTesting an Angular appUI
AutomateNow SandboxForm controls, pop-ups, and searchUI
QA-PracticeMixed UI and API practice, plus a buggy form for bug huntingUI + API
The Sweet ShopE-commerce with hidden defectsUI
Swagger PetstoreSwagger-documented REST APIAPI
Restful BookerCRUD API testing with auth tokensAPI
FakeRestAPISimple REST endpoints, no authAPI
Star Wars APIRead-only API for building a test suite or Postman collectionAPI

Why Use Demo Websites for Test Automation Practice

Before investing time in learning and building out a test suite against a new automation framework it is a good idea to try it out against different kinds of websites to ensure the framework performs reliably and is easy to work with. For example, if you are using Selenium currently, but are interested in trying Cypress, Playwright, WebDriverIO, or Nightwatch try doing more than just the basic example against these sites. This way you don't get too invested to find out your chosen automation framework doesn't work on some important area you need to write automation for.

You'll want to try out your test automation framework against things like:

  • iFrames
  • Modal dialogs
  • New tabs
  • Multiple windows
  • Asynchronous loading of content
  • File upload dialogs

You may not have one or all of these scenarios in your current automated software testing project. These demo sites become useful to provide somewhere to practice skills around these harder scenarios if you don't get exposure in your normal everyday feature testing.

Best Playwright Practice Websites by Feature

If you're learning Playwright specifically, here's where to practice the features you'll lean on most:

  • Frames: The Internet's nested frames page is good practice for frameLocator().
  • Shadow DOM: The Internet's shadow DOM page. Playwright locators pierce open shadow roots by default, so this is a good way to see that in action.
  • New tabs and windows: The Internet's multiple windows page, for practicing waiting on a new page from the browser context.
  • File upload: The Internet's file upload page, for setInputFiles().
  • Auto-waiting and slow content: UI Testing Playground's load delay and AJAX data pages show how Playwright's auto-waiting handles delays without manual sleeps.
  • Reusing login state: SauceDemo's multiple test users make it a good place to practice saving and reusing authentication with storageState.
  • API testing: Restful Booker requires an auth token for updates and deletes, which is good practice for Playwright's request fixture.
  • Playwright's own demo: demo.playwright.dev/todomvc is the TodoMVC app used throughout Playwright's documentation, so you can follow along with the docs against the same app.

For bigger end-to-end flows, OrangeHRM and ParaBank are full applications where you can practice page objects and test data setup across many pages.

I've compiled a list of the best websites I've come across to practice or demo test automation frameworks against. They include the harder to automate scenarios just mentioned.

The Internet

Live site or GitHub

This GitHub repository is a collection of common test automation scenarios including hard to automate situations; nested frames, shadow DOM, keypresses, and complicated DOMs. The hosting on this site can be unreliable so fall back to their GitHub if it happens to be down.

Automation Exercise

automationexercise.com

This example clothing storefront has both a web front end to test against and APIs. The site even includes test cases to guide you.

LetCode

letcode.in

This site isolates examples around common DOM elements letting you practice on specific examples of web elements like inputs, tables, alerts, slides, calendars, and more.

UI Testing Playground

uitestingplayground.com

Smaller site, but it contains edge cases for load delays, mouse over behavior, dynamic IDs, and automation issues arising from hidden layers.

SauceDemo

saucedemo.com

Another demo web storefront (Swag Labs) useful for testing login and shopping cart flows. A key distinction on this site is that it has several different logins that give you different experiences on the same site: standard, locked out, problem user, performance glitch, error user, and visual user. Maintained by the folks at Sauce Labs.

OrangeHRM

OrangeHRM demo

A live demo of the open source OrangeHRM human resources system. I've used it in the past and it's pretty complete, and a little more polished than ParaBank. It's a full business application with modules for admin, employee records (PIM), leave, time, recruitment, performance, claims, and more, so it's a realistic target for practicing page objects and multi-page workflows. The demo login credentials are shown on the login page.

ParaBank

ParaBank

A demo online bank maintained by Parasoft. Register an account and you can practice realistic banking workflows like transferring funds, bill pay, and checking account history.

GlobalsQA Angular Banking Site

GlobalsQA

Very small example bank website written in Angular for testing your automation framework against a website written in Angular. The site has login scenarios as well as transaction listing, deposits, and withdrawal behavior workflows.

AutomateNow Forms Sandbox

AutomateNow

Small, straight-forward single page site for practicing interactions with typical form controls, search, pop up dialogs, and a map.

QA-Practice

QA-Practice

Clean site that combines several different testing exercises in a small e-commerce site:

  • Common web elements
  • API with Swagger documentation
  • Buggy web form you can use to challenge candidates to see how many bugs they can discover.

The Sweet Shop

sweetshop.netlify.app

The Sweet Shop is a fake e-commerce front end for a candy store with hidden defects and opportunity to automate:

  • Account login
  • Shopping cart
  • Product pages
  • Non-US currency

If you are learning API test automation with Playwright's request fixture, SuperTest + Mocha, or Postman, the following sites are handy REST APIs to practice tests against.

Swagger Petstore

petstore.swagger.io

Manage an example pet store inventory through this API. This site shows off the usefulness in Swagger when documenting REST APIs, but you can also practice API testing with it.

Restful Booker

restful-booker.herokuapp.com

Test all kinds of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) REST API scenarios using this example booking API, including creating an auth token for updates and deletes.

FakeRestAPI

fakerestapi.azurewebsites.net

More practice REST endpoints around a book store inventory API. This one lacks Auth operations so you can't practice token creation. However, Restful Booker (above), does support this.

Star Wars API

SWAPI

A well-documented public API for Star Wars data that can be used for practicing building your own Postman collection or automated API test suite.

Other Lists / More Reading

  1. Awesome Sites to Test On

Butch Mayhew maintains a list of more sites categorized by security, mobile, performance, and web.

  1. Automation Panda

Recommended sites by Andrew Knight.

  1. API Testing in Nightwatch.js

Frequently Asked Questions

Know of a good one?

If you know of any other good sites I should include please reach out through my social links below 👇