Grokking the Coding Interview Review: Educative or DesignGurus?

Search for Grokking the Coding Interview in 2026 and you land on two different products with the same name, sold by two different companies, at two different prices. Educative still sells the course it originally hosted, bundled into an annual subscription for roughly $149 to $249 a year. DesignGurus sells its own rebuilt version, crediting a different named instructor, as a one-time $197 purchase with more patterns and more lessons. Neither company makes the split obvious on its own sales page, so if you're comparing the two, the DesignGurus edition is the more current and more complete one on raw pattern count, and it's a better fit if you want to pay once and own it, while the Educative edition still makes sense if you already pay for Educative's broader platform for other reasons.

Most pages that show up for this search either sell you one edition without mentioning the other exists, or repeat old forum threads without checking either company's current price and course contents. This page checked both platforms directly, laid the specifics next to each other, and connects the "which edition" question to the bigger one most candidates actually care about: whether a fixed pattern course, either edition, is the right tool for the prep window you actually have.

Why are there two different versions of the same course?

The two companies credit two different people as the course's creator, which is the clearest sign of how far the split runs. Educative's course page names Fahim ul Haq, Educative's co-founder and CEO, as the author, with a bio describing him as a former software engineer at Meta and Microsoft who says he built the course after watching talented engineers fail interviews he thought they should have passed. DesignGurus' course page instead credits Arslan Ahmad as primary creator, a former hiring manager across Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Uber who says he's personally run more than 500 interviews, with input from other senior engineers at those same companies. We didn't find anything on either company's site connecting those two names into one shared history, so rather than guess at a founding story neither page actually tells, treat them as two named authors, each credited by a different company, for a course that shares a title.

DesignGurus' course page states plainly that the earlier, text-only version once hosted on Educative is no longer maintained by the original authors. Educative disputes that in practice, if not in words: the Educative course page we checked showed a content update within the last two weeks, which complicates a claim that it's abandoned. We can't independently verify what that update actually changed, so treat the "who still maintains this" question as genuinely unsettled rather than something either company's marketing page has fully resolved for you.

What isn't unsettled is that the two courses have drifted apart in content. They share the same pattern-based teaching approach and the same title, but each company has since built out its own version independently, at its own pace, with its own pattern count and its own problem set. Buying "Grokking the Coding Interview" without checking which company you're buying it from means you might get either the 28-pattern Educative edition or the 41-pattern DesignGurus edition, and the two aren't interchangeable once you're past the first few lessons.

What does the Educative edition actually include?

Educative's Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns teaches 28 coding patterns, ranging from two pointers and sliding window through dynamic programming, graphs, tries, and union find, across roughly 1,125 lessons and 85 hours of content. It ships more than 500 coding challenges plus 17 AI-driven mock interviews, and solutions are available in Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, C++, and C#. Each pattern follows the same rhythm: you attempt your own solution first, then work through a guided, step-by-step optimal one, which suits a candidate who wants to be walked through the reasoning rather than just shown an answer.

You can't buy this course as a standalone purchase. It comes bundled into Educative's subscription, specifically the Premium tier pitched at interview prep, priced at roughly $199 a year based on an independent pricing check from January 2026 (Standard runs about $149 a year, Premium Plus about $249). Confirm the live number on educative.io before you subscribe, since subscription pricing shifts with promotions and region.

What does the DesignGurus edition actually include?

DesignGurus' Grokking the Coding Interview teaches 41 coding patterns across 49 chapters, 671 lessons, and 721 in-browser playgrounds, with more than 300 hand-picked problems spanning easy through hard. Coverage runs from the same foundational patterns through more advanced structures rarely taught together in one course: segment trees, binary indexed trees, meet in the middle, prefix sums, articulation points and bridges, an ordered set pattern, and advanced graph and topological-sort techniques, again with solutions in Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, Go, and C#. It also includes 34 hint-free "Test Your Knowledge" problems meant to simulate an actual interview rather than a guided lesson.

Unlike Educative, DesignGurus sells this specific course on its own for $197, a one-time payment for lifetime access, including future updates and discussion access, at last check, and the introductory lessons are free to preview before you pay anything. If you'd rather have every course on the platform, DesignGurus also runs an all-access subscription at $123 a month or about $373 a year, which adds a handful of AI coding mock interviews annually. For a candidate who only wants this one course, the standalone purchase is the cheaper path; the subscription only pays off if you plan to work through several of DesignGurus' other courses too.

Trial and refund terms differ between the two companies as well, and they're easy to miss until you've already paid. DesignGurus lets you preview the introductory lessons free before buying, so you can judge the teaching style before committing $197. Its course page doesn't publish a separate money-back guarantee beyond that free preview, so confirm any refund window directly with DesignGurus before you pay if that matters to you. Educative runs a 7-day free trial instead, but its own subscription FAQ states directly that canceling mid-period does not get you a refund. You keep access until the period you already paid for ends, and nothing more, which makes the 7-day trial the only real no-cost way to judge Educative's edition before you're committed to a full year.

Which edition should you actually buy?

If you're choosing between the two editions specifically, and price and pattern count are your main factors, DesignGurus is the stronger pick: more patterns, a free preview of the introductory lessons, and a one-time price that beats a year of Educative once you're past roughly twelve months of use. The one real exception is a candidate who already pays for Educative's broader subscription for its system design, cloud, or general software engineering catalog; for that reader, the coding-patterns course is already included, and paying twice for overlapping content doesn't make sense.

The table below lines up both editions against LiveCodingInterview.com, on the specifics that actually change a buying decision rather than either company's marketing language.

How does the actual learning experience compare?

Both editions use the same basic format: text-based lessons with an in-browser code editor, rather than video you scrub back through to find one line of code. That's a real advantage over a video-first course for a candidate who reads faster than they watch and wants to jump straight back to the one paragraph that explains a specific pattern. Where the two diverge is depth per playground. DesignGurus splits its 41 patterns across 721 playgrounds and 671 lessons, averaging out to more granular, bite-sized practice per concept, while Educative spreads 28 patterns across roughly 1,125 lessons and 85 hours, which reads as a broader, slower-paced walk through fewer patterns.

The two also differ in how they check your understanding. Educative leans on AI-driven mock interview checkpoints after each chapter, a conversational format meant to simulate talking through your reasoning out loud. DesignGurus leans on 34 hint-free "Test Your Knowledge" problems dropped in without a guided walkthrough, closer to how an actual interviewer hands you a cold problem and watches you work. Neither approach is strictly better; a candidate who wants a low-pressure way to rehearse explaining their thinking tends to prefer the guided mock-interview format, while a candidate who wants to know honestly whether they've actually retained a pattern tends to prefer being tested cold.

Is a pattern course enough on its own for a real onsite?

Both editions do the same job well: they teach you to recognize the shape of a problem, so an unfamiliar question stops looking unfamiliar once you spot the pattern underneath it. That's real, transferable skill, and reviewers who've bought either edition consistently credit the pattern-first framing over grinding an unsorted problem list. What a centrally authored course structurally can't do is tell you which pattern a specific company has actually leaned on in its loop recently, because the lesson plan is fixed once it's published and updated on the company's own schedule, not pulled from this week's candidate reports.

That's the specific gap LiveCodingInterview.com is built to close: a selectively curated question bank of coding, system design, OOD, and SQL questions sourced from real candidate reports and onsite loops, each tagged by company and by how recently it was seen, currently free while the pricing page explains. It isn't a replacement for learning the patterns in the first place; it's what you check once you already know them and want to know what a specific team has actually been asking.

When does buying either edition make sense in your timeline?

The honest answer depends more on how much runway you have and what you're missing than on which edition wins on paper. A candidate who doesn't yet recognize the common patterns on sight gets real value from either course, since both teach the underlying reasoning rather than just handing over answers. A candidate with interviews scheduled in the next week or two gets far less value from starting a 40-plus-pattern course cold, no matter which edition, since there isn't time to work through it properly before the loop.

• You don't yet recognize patterns on sight: either edition is worth the money, and DesignGurus' one-time price is the better deal if you don't already subscribe to Educative for other reasons.
• You already pay for Educative's broader catalog: use the bundled edition you already have access to instead of paying DesignGurus separately for overlapping content.
• Your onsite is one to two weeks out: skip a new course purchase entirely and spend the time on company-tagged, recent questions instead.

There's also a middle case worth naming directly: a candidate who already worked through one edition months ago and is now wondering whether to buy the other one too, and that's rarely worth it, since the two courses overlap heavily on the foundational patterns both teach. A second purchase mostly buys you the extra patterns DesignGurus covers that Educative doesn't, like segment trees or articulation points, rather than a fundamentally different skill. Unless a specific upcoming interview loop is known for asking questions in that advanced range, that budget is usually better spent on a company-tagged practice source than on a second pattern course covering ground you've mostly already learned.

Either edition teaches the patterns well; neither one replaces checking what a specific company has actually asked lately, and treating the course as the finish line instead of the starting point is the most common way candidates waste the money either company charges for it.

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