11 BEST Coding Interview Preparation Courses Compared (2023)

Written By John Sonmez

Best Immersive

interview

kickstart

Interview Kickstart is a comprehensive  2-4mo interview prep online bootcamp.

Best for Soft Skills

accelerate your software developer career

Accelerate your S.D. career has the best advice on personal presentation skills.

Best for Budget

master the coding Interview - udemy

Master the Coding Interview has hours of video lectures at an affordable price.

Best Overall

algo

expert

Algo Expert offers curated questions, videos and IDE at a good price point.

The 3 categories of courses

  • All-inclusive interview prep courses. These teach you how to solve both coding and behavioral questions - the complete package.
  • Soft skills courses. Focusing most on the interpersonal and meta-skills you need to answer questions well and win over your employer. 
  • Pure coding questions courses. They're providing detailed problem-solving steps and a live coding environment for effective interview preparation.

Criteria for evaluating the courses

  • How well they instruct algorithms & data structures. You should get so much practice in your coding course that you’ve got these topics down pat. They should be making you so good at DSA that you’ll blaze through any question. 
  • Do they select the best interview questions? You don’t want to grind out 1000s of mildly related problems. You don’t need a course for that. What you want is to only learn what’s most relevant to your upcoming interview.
  • Whether they teach problem-solving. With the right approach, you need not fear any challenge thrown at you during the interview. A great coding interview prep course teaches you how to take apart any problem – and solve it in the most efficient way.
  • Value for your investment. Diving into the skills for far-out future interviews? Then it’s fine to start with a budget option to get your feet wet. Maximize your chances at an upcoming interview? Invest more in an in-depth course, for a big potential payoff.

Complete Interview Prep Courses - Coding & behavioral

There are a courses you can use to prepare for your coding interview out there that have it all: 

  • They’re turning you into a master at solving coding questions. 
  • They’re revealing the right approach to problem-solving. 
  • Plus they’re preparing you for the behavioral part of the interview, instilling in you the proper mindset for success , and teaching you those crucial, often-neglected soft skills. 

So you’ll go into your coding interview with confidence & impress the recruiters.


These are the best complete courses out there:

  • Best for: If you’re looking for a more focused alternative to LeetCode with good video explanations.
  • Unique features: They've added systems design & behavioral courses to their bundle. Mock interviews with other users.
  • Price: $79 for the complete Tech Interview Bundle.

Your instructors at AlgoExpert

  • Clement Mihailescu, founder of AlgoExpert, an Ex-Facebook Software Engineer with a 400k strong YouTube Channel. 
  • Tim Ruscica aka Tech with Tim (over 1 million subscribers on YouTube), Ex-Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft. 
  • Ex-Amazon and Facebook Software Engineers for the Front-End & Machine Learning courses.

Course content

With AlgoExpert, you’ll learn to solve hand-picked, relevant coding interview questions inside their platform.

  • For each problem, you get a detailed video explaining the best way to solve it. 
  • There’s a module with coding interview tips, and you get curated practice tests to assess whether your interview preparation has been successful.
  • You can sharpen your skills in a live environment by doing mock interviews with other users on the platform.
  • The tech interview bundle also features a whole course on systems design, plus 15 lessons on behavioral interview prep.

Pros & Cons

  • Curated questions so you only learn what’s relevant to your interview.
  • Great value for the modest price.
  • The behavioral section could be more comprehensive.
  • Best for: If you want the immersive bootcamp experience.
  • Unique features: 7-18 week cohort-based instruction. A 6-month support period where they help you polish your resume & more.
  • Price: $6200

We've also taken a more in-depth look at Interview Kickstart's program if you'd like to know all the details.

Your instructors at Interview Kickstart

Your instructors at Interview Kickstart will be tech leads and hiring managers conducting coding / behavioral interviews at FAANG and Tier-1 companies.

Course content

The bootcamp will have you master concepts and solve problems in data structures, algorithms and systems design. On top of that they’ll teach you role-specific skills as well as soft (behavioral) skills and give career advice.

Here’s how your weekly schedule will look with Interview Kickstart:

📆Friday: You’ll receive the pre-class study material on foundational concepts
📆
Sunday: Live class on the week’s topic with a FAANG+ instructor
📆
Mon-Wed: Solve the curated question sets and run test cases
📆
Thursday: Simulated tests and instructor-led calibrated discussions

Pros & Cons

  • You’ll go into the most depth with the Interview Kickstart online coding bootcamp – as it stretches over 2-4 months.
  • You’ll be most likely to follow through with all the lessons because the instructor sessions are scheduled, and you’re expected to participate in the tests and assignments.
  • You’ll invest the most money into Interview Kickstart compared to all other online coding preparation courses.
  • Best for: If you’re looking to get helpful hints while solving coding questions, just like you would in a real interview.
  • Unique features: Helpful, progressive hints for solving questions. 100-day ‘no questions asked’ refund policy. Read all about Interview Cake here.
  • Price: $149 for 3 months, $249 for 12 months

Your instructors at Interview Cake

Parker Phinney started Interview Cake in 2013 after helping his friend prepare for a round of coding interviews and her getting a job at Facebook. 

He refined his approach by teaching students at coding bootcamps in San Francisco.

Course content

First, you’ll get a high-level instruction in algorithmic thinking — which you can then apply to the rest of the course.

The next 8 modules have you master all types of algorithms & data structures.

Then you have 4 modules not all other courses offer you, teaching you:

  • System design
  • General programming
  • Bit manipulation
  • Combinatorics & math
  • JavaScript-specific questions
  • Coding interview tips

Pros & Cons

  • Good instruction of technical questions you need to prepare for coding interviews.
  • Easy to pick & choose specific topics to drill. 50 hours of practice questions & readings.
  • Plus a small section on soft skills and mental hacks.
  • Only written instructions and explanations, no video content.
  • Best for: If you want to master problem-solving skills.
  • Unique features: Best at coming up with patterns for solving questions. You can access over 300 other courses (for example Grokking the Behavioral Interview) on the platform. Upon completing the course, you’ll earn a certificate.
  • Price: $19.99 per month

Your instructors at educative.io

Educative was launched in 2015 by three software engineers working at eBay, Microsoft and Facebook.

Course content

Your instructors at educative.io have come up with 16 patterns for coding interview questions. This allows you to solve any problem once you know which pattern it belongs to.
Every problem in the course is solved in Java, Python, C++ and JavaScript.
It’ll take you around 50 hours to complete the interview prep course:
182 lessons, 125 challenges, 1043 playgrounds, 217 illustrations.


Pros & Cons

  • Access to different courses like systems design and most coding languages.
  • A code compiler is included.
  • You get a certificate after you’ve completed the course.
  • Great if you like reading. But no videos.

Behavioral (Soft Skills) Prep Courses for Programming Interview

These courses dive deep into some of the intangibles of getting a great software engineer job.

You need to master soft skills to properly market yourself and maximize your value on the job market. 

If you apply these lessons, you can outshine the other (even the more skilled) candidates.

These are the best behavioral and soft skills courses to prep your coding interview:

  • Best for: Gaining the right mindset for coding interviews & learning how to present yourself in the best way possible. Maximizing your market value as a programmer.
  • Unique features: A course module on how to “dress to impress” at your interview. The “Job Hunting Plan” module & the “Salary Negotiation” module.
  • Price: $175

Your instructor

I’m John Sonmez, the founder of Simple Programmer. In Accelerate Your Software Developer Career, you’ll get the strategies I’ve used to work my way up to lucrative senior development positions. You’ll benefit from knowledge I’ve used to create 55 PluralSight training courses on topics ranging from Java to iOS to GoLang, and to write the best-selling book, Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual. The “soft skills” tactics you’ll learn have led me to become a speaker at international developer conferences and consult with major corporations like Verizon.

Course content

  • The “hard” questions: Language-specific questions, algorithm & data structure questions, design pattern questions, object oriented questions, SQL & database questions. Video explanations on how to solve each.
  • The “how” of solving coding interview questions. If you have the right process, you can crack most questions, no matter their content. Because you know how to approach and solve the problem presented.
  • The “soft” questions: Behavioral questions, plus how to prepare for the best chance to ace the interview.

Plus: The best way to hunt for jobs, present yourself as a programmer, and negotiate your salary.

Pros & Cons

  • Best for: Learning job-getting skills in a concise course.
  • Unique features: Advice in video format coupled with checklists for each resume / interview skill.
  • Price: $99

Your instructor

Jeremy Schifeling is an ex-kindergarten teacher who ‘broke into tech’ (hence the name of his company Break Into Tech) and ended up working at Apple and LinkedIn. Now he’s teaching you how to get a job in Big Tech, too, even if you’re coming from a non-technical background.

Course content

‘Land Your First Tech Job’ is 100% focused on the career and behavioral skills needed to get a job, not on the coding questions themselves. The interview prep course teaches you:

  • Resume skills
  • Interview skills
  • Confidence
  • Behavioral questions

Pros & Cons

  • Break into Tech teaches valuable tactics for getting noticed by recruiters, getting interviews, and succeeding at the interview process, in a structured way.
  • Easy to consume and understand.
  • If you want to learn data structures & algorithms, or any of the hard skills needed for your coding interview, you’ll need to get another course on top of this one.

PURE Coding Courses for Interview Preparation

Got your soft skills and behavioral answers already dialed in? 

Just want to laser-focus on perfecting your coding questions approach? 

Then these pure coding courses are your best interview prep resource.

  • Best for: If you’d like to learn algorithms & data structures on a budget. Focusing on interview questions asked at FAANG companies.
  • Unique features: Over 36 hours of video lectures just on algorithms & data structures. Lowest price of all courses.
  • Price: $55

Your instructors at Udemy

Andrew Neagoie is the founder of Zero to Mastery. A self-taught programmer, he’s been working as a senior software developer in Silicon Valley and Toronto for many years. He has taught many people to get jobs at FAANG companies.
Yihua Zhang, also a self-taught developer, has been working for Big Tech in Toronto for many years, and been a coding instructor for over ten.

Course content

This is how explanations are structured in Master the Coding Interview: Your instructor clarifies what the question is aiming at. He details your best approach to solving it. Then he goes through the multiple steps of the solution clearly with clear instructions.
Here’s all that the course addresses:

  • Arrays questions
  • Strings questions
  • Linked list questions
  • Stacks questions
  • Trees questions
  • Graphs questions
  • Algorithm questions


Pros & Cons

  • Good, in-depth video explanations of data structures & algorithms concepts and problems.
  • Using questions asked in actual FAANG coding interviews.
  • No interactive element
  • Without code assessment
  • No soft skills module
  • Best for: If you’re looking for in-depth algorithm & systems design instruction coupled with the ability to interact with the instructors weekly.
  • Unique features: Online coding bootcamp. Mentor-led & self-based. Weekly live session with job search advice. Slack community for members.
  • Price: $250 per year

Your instructor at Interview Camp

Harsh Goel is a Software Engineer who has worked at Google and Pinterest in San Francisco. He has received many tech job offers, including from Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft. 

Course content

The Interview Camp coding interview preparation course packs over 60 hours of video content. You’ll learn algorithms, data structures and systems design from the ground up.

➡️Each week, you get a live group video session that lasts 90 minutes. It starts with a deep dive on a system designs topic. After that you can get any question you’d like answered. The calls are recorded for you to review later.

Pros & Cons

  • You get top-notch instruction on coding interview questions.
  • Weekly access to the instructors is valuable. Slack group is great for co-learning and networking.
  • A full, no-questions-asked refund is given within the first 7 days if you don’t like the bootcamp.
  • Apart from the live calls where you could ask questions on this topic, there’s no instruction of behavioral skills.
  • Best for: If you want to do real-time coding right inside the platform while studying the questions. If you value interactivity & in-depth learning over fancy videos.
  • Unique features: They guarantee you’ll get at least one tech job offer after going through their coding interview prep course.
  • Price: $35 per month or $320 lifetime

Your instructors at AlgoExpert

AlgoMonster was founded by Google engineers who were fed up with having so sift through 1000s of problems on platforms like LeetCode to try and prepare yourself for your coding interview.

Course content

Inside the course, you’ll learn the five basic patterns all coding interview questions are based on. That way you have a high-level view of any problem presented – and you’re able to pick the most efficient solution.

The interactive environment helps you actually learn, by giving you constant feedback on your inputs, not having you just passively watch videos.

Pros & Cons

  • You work on the problems in a real coding environment on their platform.
  • AlgoMonster has almost 700 illustrations to go along with their instructions.
  • The price is decent if you’re just going to need your subscription for a few months.
  • AlgoMonster wants you to do the work yourself, not just sit back and watch – so there’s no videos inside the course.
  • Best for: If you’re looking for an affordable, risk-free coding interview course investment.
  • Unique features: If this course doesn’t land you a job, you get your money back.
  • Price: $99

Your instructor at Skilled.Dev

Trey Huffine is a software engineer with years of experience working for Silicon Valley startups. He even got a job offer after interviewing with Google. Since 2019 he has been building career tools for SWEs at gitconnected.com, and teaching coding interviews on Skilled.Dev.

Course content

Solution videos: Trey walks you through every coding solution in a 10-15 minute video.
Guided articles: First you’re getting a written explanation of the problem. Then you can view a detailed written & illustrated breakdown of each step for solving it. At each step you have the opportunity to have your code answer validated by the platform.
Live code execution: You can tackle whole interview questions right there inside the built-in coding environment. At any point, you can choose to look at hints or take a glance at the solution provided.

Pros & Cons

  • Between the coding input, written explanations plus videos explaining concepts and providing walk-throughs, you’ll get an all-round system for mastering coding interview questions with Skilled.Dev.
  • The job guarantee is a cool bonus.
  • The platform currently uses only JavaScript and TypeScript languages.
  • Best for: If you’re a coder with a strong foundation in a specific language, and want to go to the next level, where you’ll be able to solve any coding interview question with ease.
  • Unique features: Upon completing the course, you’ll earn a certificate.
  • Price: $19.99 per month

Your instructors at CodeCademy

CodeCademy - an established code-learning platform - employs dozens of experienced software engineers.

Course content

The ‘Pass the Technical Interview’ courses instruct you in advanced coding skills in your language of choice. It is 8 weeks in proposed length.
After that, you’ll learn all elements of the coding interview – with lessons on all aspects of data structures & algorithms.
The focus is on writing clean, professional-level code.
Included are lessons, articles, projects, quizzes and videos to prepare you for your coding interview.
It even has a short section on interviewing tips and tricks.

Pros & Cons

  • Excellent instruction and focus on clean code principles.
  • Affordable monthly Pro subscription that gets you access to many other coding courses as well.
  • The section on interview tips is just a small add-on.

The Winners for Best Coding Interview Prep Courses

Best Immersive

interview

kickstart

Best for Soft Skills

accelerate your software developer career

Best for Budget

master the coding Interview - udemy

Best Overall

algo

expert