Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Mockaroo VS DocSpring

Compare Mockaroo VS DocSpring and see what are their differences

Mockaroo logo Mockaroo

A realistic data generator to test your app

DocSpring logo DocSpring

PDF filling API that makes it easy to fill out PDF forms and convert HTML to PDFs
  • Mockaroo Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-27
  • DocSpring PDF Template Editor
    PDF Template Editor //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring HTML Template Preview
    HTML Template Preview //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring HTML Template Editor
    HTML Template Editor //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring Auto-generated Web Form
    Auto-generated Web Form //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring E-Signatures
    E-Signatures //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring View Submissions
    View Submissions //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring View API Request Logs
    View API Request Logs //
    2025-02-26
  • DocSpring Postman Collection
    Postman Collection //
    2025-02-26

We provide a PDF filling and generation API:

  • Upload your PDF to our visual template editor to set up form fields and data types
  • Post JSON to fill out existing PDF forms with data
  • Generate editable PDF forms, or overlay static data on top of fields
  • Create HTML/CSS templates with Liquid fields, then post JSON to generate PDFs
  • Use our merge API to combine multiple PDFs into a single document

PDF generation doesn't need to be complicated or take weeks of engineering time. Use our battle-tested service to start filling out PDFs in minutes.

DocSpring

$ Details
freemium $49.0 / Monthly (Starter - 50 PDFs / mo)
Release Date
2017 October
Startup details
Country
United States
State
Delaware
City
Newark
Founder(s)
Nathan Broadbent
Employees
1 - 9

Mockaroo features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Mockaroo provides a user-friendly interface that makes it simple to generate data quickly. Users can easily define data types and settings with minimal effort.
  • Customizability
    It offers extensive customization options, allowing users to define schemas and specify various data types, constraints, and formats to match their specific needs.
  • Data Volume
    Mockaroo supports large-scale data generation, enabling the creation of datasets with millions of rows, which is useful for performance testing and large applications.
  • API Access
    The platform provides an API for integrating data generation into automated workflows or applications, enhancing flexibility for developers.
  • Variety of Data Types
    A wide range of predefined data types, including text, numbers, dates, geographic locations, and even custom lists, allows for diverse and realistic dataset creation.

Possible disadvantages of Mockaroo

  • Cost for Advanced Features
    While Mockaroo offers a free tier, advanced features and higher data volume usage may require a subscription, potentially increasing costs for extensive use.
  • Learning Curve for Complex Data
    For users with complex data generation needs, there can be a learning curve to understanding how to effectively use advanced features and define complex schemas.
  • Data Privacy
    Since Mockaroo is a third-party tool, there may be concerns about data privacy, particularly if sensitive data formats are being simulated and downloaded from the platform.
  • Dependent on Internet Access
    As a web-based tool, Mockaroo requires a stable internet connection, which may limit usage in environments with restricted or unreliable connectivity.

DocSpring features and specs

  • Automated PDF Generation
    DocSpring allows users to automate the generation of PDFs by filling out templates with data. This can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to create documents.
  • API Integration
    DocSpring offers a robust API, which allows developers to integrate PDF generation into their own applications easily, enhancing productivity and workflow automation.
  • Flexible Templates
    The platform supports flexible and customizable templates, enabling businesses to maintain brand consistency while meeting specific document formatting requirements.
  • Secure Data Handling
    DocSpring is SOC 2 Type II compliant. We ensure data security through encryption and secure storage options, making it suitable for handling sensitive information.
  • Ease of Use
    The user interface is designed to be intuitive, making it easy for businesses to create and manage PDF templates without requiring extensive technical knowledge.

Mockaroo videos

Best Free Sample Data Generator - Mockaroo.com

More videos:

  • Review - Mockaroo Extra Import Options

DocSpring videos

No DocSpring videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Mockaroo and DocSpring)
Testing
100 100%
0% 0
PDF Tools
0 0%
100% 100
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Document Automation
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Mockaroo and DocSpring.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

DocSpring's answer:

Ruby on Rails, React, AWS

What makes your product unique?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is built specifically for developers who need reliable, secure PDF generation in production. We combine PDF form filling and HTML-to-PDF in a single API, with a visual template editor, typed fields, and validation to catch issues early. Our product has a lot of power features and is built to handle very advanced forms. Our infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II compliant, battle-tested, privacy focused, and optimized for high-volume workloads, so you can ship PDF features quickly and then stop thinking about them.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is designed for teams who need a powerful tool with all the features you need for complex forms and business logic. DocSpring supports structured JSON, typed fields, and array iterations, and many other advanced features, so your templates stay aligned with your real data model. You get powerful validation, a visual editor, strong observability, and an API that fits into modern engineering workflows, so you spend less time fighting PDFs and more time shipping product.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

DocSpring's answer:

DocSpring is built for engineering and product teams who manage complex documents in production: things like financial applications, insurance forms, healthcare and legal documents, HR and payroll workflows, and government-style forms.

What's the story behind your product?

DocSpring's answer:

I used to work at a payroll company (Gusto). We had built a similar in-house tool for filling out tax forms. I then built the first version of DocSpring (formerly named FormAPI) while I was living in Thailand. I built it to automate the filling out of visa application and visa extension forms, but realized that it could also be used for tax forms, real estate contracts, and any other kind of fillable PDF form.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

DocSpring's answer:

  • SaaS services serving customers in the real estate, insurance, finance, and legal industries, among many others.

User comments

Share your experience with using Mockaroo and DocSpring. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Mockaroo should be more popular than DocSpring. It has been mentiond 27 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Mockaroo mentions (27)

  • Human coders are still better than LLMs
    If you give it the rules to generate something, why can't it generate it? That's what something like Mockaroo[0] does. It's just more formal. That's pretty much what LLM training does, extracting patterns from a huge corpus of text. Then it goes one to generate according to the patterns. It can not generate a new pattern that is not a combination of the previous one. [0]: https://mockaroo.com/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Frugal SQL data access with Athena and Blue / Green support
    A quick way to test this out is to use a tool like Mockaroo to generate some test data and then have a Glue Crawler analyse the data in S3 and create the required data catalog entries. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Mockaroo โ€” Mockaroo lets you generate realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats. You can also create mocks for back-end API. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Using Snowflake data hosted in GCP with AWS Glue
    I generated some test data to load into Snowflake using Mockaroo. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • How to Get Mock Data Fast in Your Applications
    So head to Mockaroo, and configure the data model fields to match that of the class you created earlier, for me, it looks like this:. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

DocSpring mentions (5)

  • Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2025)
    I'm still working on DocSpring [1], originally launched on Hacker News in October 2017 under the name "FormAPI." It's a PDF generation API with a template editor UI for setting up fields on PDF forms. It makes it easy to turn complex tax and immigration forms into simple type-safe APIs with strong validations. I've been having a lot of fun with AI agents lately. Have tried a lot of them - Cline, Roo Code,... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) โ€“ A better way to create PDFs
    For programmatic filling of PDFs, have a look at DocSpring: https://docspring.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand
    Great post. I've spend a lot of time reading through the PDF specification over the last ~5 years while building DocSpring [1], and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Qpdf is a great tool. One of my other favorites is RUPS [2], which really lets you dig into the structure of a PDF. [1] https://docspring.com [2] https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Workflow for automating document creation from a "database"
    Hi /u/pepeday, Iโ€™m the founder of a software product that I built to solve this problem. The service is called DocSpring: https://docspring.com We provide a platform that you can use to set up PDF templates, and automatically generate PDFs by filling in those templates with data from your database. Please feel free to send me a message and Iโ€™d be happy to speak with you and help you figure out a solution. I can... Source: almost 5 years ago
  • How do you fill copies of the same PDF certificates with Excel data?
    - https://docspring.com/ (super advanced features, a bit bloated). Source: almost 5 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Mockaroo and DocSpring, you can also consider the following products

Generate Data - GenerateData.com: free, GNU-licensed, random custom data generator for testing software

DocRaptor - As the only API powered by the Prince HTML-to-PDF engine, DocRaptor provides the best support for complex PDFs with powerful support for headers, page breaks, page numbers, flexbox, watermarks, accessible PDFs, and much more

Beeceptor - Unblock yourself from API dependencies, and build & integrate with APIs fast. Beeceptor helps you build a mock Rest API in a few seconds.

Doczilla - Effortlessly create stunning PDFs and screenshots. Seamlessly store them in your own AWS or Google Cloud Storage bucket, putting the control and creativity right at your fingertips.

Tonic AI - The fake data company

wkhtmltopdf - wkhtmltopdf is an open source (LGPL) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image...