ISTQB Practice Test Alternatives: ExamTopics, Whizlabs, Mock Exam Network and Free Options

Almost nobody looks for an ISTQB practice test alternative out of curiosity. Something already went wrong: a question browser turned out to be a dump, a course bundle's quiz did not look like the exam, a free set never said which syllabus it was built on. What you want is a replacement that will not cost you another three weeks.

This list covers what is actually on offer, checked on each site on 22 October 2026. It says what each option gives you, what it does not, and which one fits the reason you are leaving.

What an alternative actually has to replace

An ISTQB practice test does three jobs: it tells you whether you know the current syllabus, it rehearses the exam under its real constraints, and it teaches you something when you pick the wrong option. Most of the sites people abandon do one of the three and ignore the other two. A question browser is strong on volume and has no timer. A course quiz teaches well and bears no resemblance to the exam. A dump does neither, whatever the banner promises.

Three checks that settle it in a minute

1. Does the site name the syllabus version, minor number included? CTFL is on v4.0.1 and CT-AI on v2.0. A set built on CTFL 2018 or CT-AI v1.0 asks about material that has since been replaced.

2. Do the numbers match the official exam? CTFL is 40 questions, 40 points, 26 to pass and 60 minutes, plus 25 percent extra time for non-native speakers. Those figures come from the ISTQB Exam Structures and Rules Tables, at v1.19 today. A site that states 20 of 40 to pass, or a 66 percent threshold, has not read them.

3. Is there a rationale on every wrong option? One line defending the key is not the same thing. You learn from being told why the option you actually chose fails, and that is the part most catalogues skip.

1. ExamCaliber

Forty-eight full-length mock exams across nine certifications, 2,024 questions, free and without an account. Every answer option carries a written rationale, not only the key, and every mock has a questions-and-answers page you can read straight through instead of sitting the timed run. Question counts, points, pass marks and time limits follow the Exam Structures and Rules Tables for each exam, and the chapter split inside a mock follows the official weighting rather than whatever was easy to write.

Coverage runs past Foundation: CTFL v4.0 with fifteen mocks, CT-AI v2.0, CT-GenAI v1.1, CTAL-TA v4.0 and A4Q Selenium Tester among them. Twenty-six of the forty-eight mocks are also published in German and Spanish. If you want a single page that lists every mock with its question count, time and pass mark, that is the practice tests index; if you want to start with the exam most people sit first, start at CTFL mock exam 1.

2. The official ISTQB sample exams

Free, authoritative and smaller than most people expect. The CTFL v4.0 certification page carries four sets: A and B at question version 1.7, C at 1.6 and D at 1.5, 40 questions each, with answer files that give the key, the learning objective, the K-level and a short justification. That is 160 questions in total, and they are the only questions written by the people who write the exam.

The limits are obvious once you open them. They are PDFs: no timer, no scoring, no shuffling, and once you have read a set you cannot sit it cold again. They are a benchmark, not a training volume. ISTQB's own self-study guidance is blunt about the order of things: "The relevant ISTQB syllabus and ISTQB Glossary should be used as a minimum." Sample exams come after the reading, not instead of it.

3. Member board sample exams

The national member boards that actually deliver the exam publish their own practice material. AT*SQA and ASTQB, which deliver ISTQB exams in the United States, offer sample exams written to match the question style of the exams they run, and they are unusually direct about the rest of the market: they state that the generic sample exams and third-party exam dumps are not designed to match the style of any ISTQB exam. If you are booking through a particular board, check what that board publishes before you look anywhere else.

4. istqb.expandtesting.com

Eight quizzes, no sign-up, three modes: one question at a time with instant feedback, a timed exam run, and a questions-and-answers view. The catalogue is four Foundation quizzes, two CTFL-AT quizzes, one CTAL-TA v4.0 set and one CT-AI v2.0 set. Content is available in English, French and Spanish, which makes it one of the few free options with a Spanish interface, though there is no German. It is a good second opinion and a poor main source, because eight quizzes run out quickly and nothing above those four syllabi exists there.

5. Mock Exam Network

The largest catalogue in the category, and the one whose headline number needs reading carefully. The front page advertises 42,260 or more syllabus-aligned questions across 27 certification exams. Two things are worth knowing before you plan around that: 7,960 of those questions belong to CompTIA Security+, which is not an ISTQB certification at all, so the ISTQB subtotal is 34,300 across 26 lists; and the page title still says 18,000 or more. The catalogue also keeps CT-SEC and CT-STE as separate lists, 2,545 and 1,875 questions, without saying that the first has been succeeded by the second.

What you do get is a free tier that does not ask for a card, timed full-length mocks, chapter practice and a premium tier with weak-area targeting and flashcards. If raw volume is what you were missing, this is where the volume is.

What you leave behind on ExamTopics

ExamTopics lists 22 ISTQB exams, and the CTFL v4.0 list holds 278 questions. The pitch on that page is the one to read closely: 95.1 percent average score at the testing centre, and 94 percent of students finding the real exam almost the same. That is a claim about resemblance to the live exam rather than about teaching you the syllabus, and it is the defining promise of a dump rather than of a practice test.

The catalogue also mixes live and replaced syllabi without flagging which is which. CTFL-2018 sits next to CTFL v4.0, a CTAL-TA V3.1 list sits next to CTAL-TA v4.0, and CT-TAE sits next to CTAL-TAE. On ISTQB's own certifications page the older Test Analyst syllabus is marked as retiring and CTFL 2018 is not listed at all. Practically, you are also giving up a timed full-length run, because what the site offers is a question browser with discussion threads rather than a mock exam.

Whizlabs does not cover ISTQB

Worth stating plainly, because Whizlabs turns up in a lot of ISTQB listicles. Checked on 22 October 2026, the catalogue is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DevOps, cyber security, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365 and Java certifications. The site describes itself as cloud certification training and practice tests. There is no ISTQB course and no ISTQB practice test. Any list that recommends it for ISTQB was assembled without opening the site.

Dump sites are a different product

istqb.guru makes no secret of what it sells. The banner across the top of the site reads "ISTQB Sure Pass Dumps. Buy and Pass Exam in a Week!" and the menu lists current and retiring syllabi side by side, including a CT-AI v1.0 entry marked old. The structural problem is not the price. It is that nothing in a dump tells you which syllabus version a given question was taken from, so you cannot run the first of the three checks on it at all. Revision time spent on questions you cannot date is revision time you cannot audit.

How the options score

The same three checks, applied to everything above. Partly means the claim is made but cannot be verified from the public pages, holds only for some exams, or sits next to a catalogue that mixes current and retired syllabi.

Pick by the reason you are switching

• The questions felt stale. Start from the official sample sets to calibrate what current questions look like, then move to a catalogue that states the version on the page.

• There was no timer. You need full-length timed runs, not question browsing. Sit 40 questions in 60 minutes and look at the score in points, because that is how the real exam is marked.

• You could not tell why you were wrong. Rationale per option is the filter, and it is the one that eliminates most of the catalogue. A good test to run: open a question on test techniques, which is the heaviest chapter in CTFL, and see whether the three wrong options are explained at all.

• It wanted a card. The official PDFs, ExamCaliber and expandtesting all work with no account at all; Mock Exam Network's free tier works without payment details.

• You are past Foundation. This is where free options thin out fast. Check that whatever you pick has full-length mocks for your exam rather than a landing page, and that the question count matches the Advanced or Specialist format, which is rarely 40.

• You study in German or Spanish. Most of the category is English only. Twenty-six ExamCaliber mocks exist in all three languages; expandtesting covers French and Spanish but not German.

Whichever way you go, the sequence that works is the same: read the syllabus, use the official sample sets to see what a real question looks like, then grind volume somewhere that explains your wrong answers and tells you which version it is testing. The sites that fail the three checks are not cheaper. They are just harder to audit.