Short answer
What to know
Use a sample file site when you need a format Payloads does not publish or a large file for upload and performance tests. loremfile.dev gives the same guarantees as Payloads across many more formats. Use Payloads when you need the same records in JSON, XML, CSV, YAML, NDJSON, MessagePack and CBOR, so a decoder's output can be compared with the JSON file.
The short comparison
| Need | Payloads | loremfile.dev | file-examples.com, filesamples.com, sample-files.com |
|---|---|---|---|
| Images, video, audio and office documents | No | Yes | Yes |
| Files of several megabytes | No; no v1 file is larger than 6 KB | Yes | Yes |
| MessagePack and CBOR files | Yes | Not in its format list | Not in their format lists |
| SHA-256 for every file | Yes, in the manifest | Yes, in its manifest | None on the pages we checked |
| Fetch from another origin in a browser | Yes; Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * | Yes; Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * | No CORS header for other origins on the files we checked |
| Licence | CC0 | CC0 | Varies; see below |
Choose loremfile.dev for breadth with the same guarantees
loremfile.dev is the closest service to Payloads. It is CC0, sends open CORS headers, publishes a SHA-256 manifest and states that the bytes at a published path do not change. It lists more than 250 files across documents, images, video, audio, archives, fonts and data formats, with edge cases and exact-size binaries, plus an MCP server for agents. If you need a multi-page PDF, an image or a media file, use it.
Choose a download site for one-off manual files
file-examples.com, filesamples.com and sample-files.com offer many formats in several sizes. sample-files.com lists JSON files from 1 KB to 5 MB, and file-examples.com offers ZIP files up to 10 MB. They are built for downloading a file by hand.
They are harder to use from automated tests. When we checked on 14 October 2026, a sample-files.com JSON file had no CORS header and contained a _credit field, a filesamples.com JSON file allowed only its own origin, and a file-examples.com JSON link returned an HTML redirect page to curl instead of the file.
Their terms differ too. sample-files.com keeps ownership and copyright of the files it created, forbids redistributing them as standalone products and asks for attribution for commercial use of its JSON samples. file-examples.com says all files are free to download and use, under an All Rights Reserved footer. filesamples.com says the service is free.
Choose Payloads for structured records across formats
Payloads publishes the same 3 users, 2 projects and 3 tasks as JSON, XML, CSV, YAML, NDJSON, plain text, HTML, MessagePack and CBOR, plus one PDF and a JSON Schema. Each collection and each record has its own versioned URL, so a test can fetch the JSON file as the expected value and a binary file as the input.