BBLabs vs OWASP Juice Shop: which one to practice web hacking?

What is OWASP Juice Shop and why is it so loved?

OWASP Juice Shop is probably the most popular deliberately vulnerable application in the world. It's modern (a JavaScript SPA), maintained by the OWASP Foundation, and its big hook is gamification: a score board with dozens of hidden challenges you discover and solve, covering the entire OWASP Top 10 and quite a bit more. All free and offline.

As a test bench for learning web hacking, it's outstanding and we recognize that without reservations. It's addictive, well built, and teaches you to think like an attacker in an app that resembles a real website far more than the classic vulnerable apps.

Where Juice Shop falls short

Juice Shop's limit is that, however good it is, it's a single app with a fixed challenge set. Once you clear them all, the content doesn't grow unless they release a new version. The writeups aren't official: you depend on community guides, almost always in English. And it's still an environment designed to be hacked, not a production application like the ones you find in a real bug bounty program.

BBLabs covers exactly that gap: each lab replicates a real bug bounty case, with its context, its exploitation chain and the bounty that was paid. There's new content every Monday, ordered by difficulty, and each lab comes with its official step-by-step writeup. It's not a challenge set you exhaust: it's a practice ground that grows every week.

Gamification: score board vs ranking and flags

Here both play well. Juice Shop's score board is addictive: watching challenges tick off is hugely motivating. BBLabs also gamifies, but in a bug-bounty-oriented way: you capture flags when you solve each lab, climb a roadmap that shows your next step, and compete in a public ranking of Spanish-speaking hunters. The difference is the goal: Juice Shop gamifies learning the OWASP Top 10; BBLabs gamifies your progress as a real bug hunter.

Language and support: self-taught English vs guided Spanish

Juice Shop supports several languages in its interface, but the learning ecosystem (guides, writeups, forums) is mostly in English and you learn on your own. BBLabs is 100% in Spanish and each lab comes with its writeup, plus a free Academy with 16 vulnerability categories (theory, payloads and methodology). You can study the theory without paying anything and then practice on real labs with support, in your language. For a Spanish speaker who's starting out, that guidance makes the difference.

Who each one is for

Verdict: Juice Shop to gamify for free, BBLabs for the jump to real bugs

It's not a duel with a single winner. OWASP Juice Shop is a free, modern, gamified resource that does its job very well: hooking you and teaching you the OWASP Top 10 in a real app. It's an honest recommendation and it costs nothing. BBLabs does something else: it turns real bug bounty reports into curated labs you practice in Spanish, with writeups, live labs and a roadmap that guides you from Easy to Insane. If you've already cleared Juice Shop's challenges and want to train on real cases that have been paid, BBLabs is the natural next step — and you can start for free with the Academy.