Best Developer Assessment Tools (Free & Paid) - 2023

Qualified.io’s technical assessment platform stands out in many ways; among our favorites is its practical library content. Though some of the languages are missing, the pre-built library provides an array of coding challenges that, according to developers, are very relevant to their day-to-day work. We also noticed Qualified.io rolled out some cool product updates: a new feature for bulk candidate invitations and new challenges are added to the library. The contribution of the online tech community of software developers and engineers behind the platform can be explained as the main reason for this.

Besides the coding challenges, the platform provides other ways to test and verify developers' skills, like standardized assessments, code review tools, benchmarking, and fraud prevention. Several developers we talked to shared that they had positive experiences taking tests on Qualified.io: they found the instructions clear and helpful, and the tests resemble actual work. From the employer's perspective, designing challenges is easy with the existing tools. However, when it comes to integrating the platform with other software, only a few options are available. If your business’s software isn’t on the pre-built connector list, Qualified.io allows custom integrations through API and Webhooks, but with fees in addition to what you have paid for the Team plan. The same goes for the reporting and exporting functionality — they are pretty solid features yet will cost you extra.

Some of the world’s biggest companies use Qualified, including Apple, Klarna, Domino's, Thinkful, Facebook, and Zoom.

Qualified.io has custom pricing. You can contact Qualified.io’s team for more information.

CodinGame is one of a few software vendors in the market that assists non-tech recruiters in assessing developers’ technical skills through game-like tests and challenges.

Creating a test in CodinGame is pretty simple, with the pre-built question library that supports over 60 languages and frameworks and 90 pre-set job roles. It's also possible for you to create a DIY test. We tested this feature and were quite happy with how it worked: it took us a few seconds for a test picked from the platform library, while a custom one required a few minutes.

Another thing we liked about this tech assessment platform is its reporting capabilities. There’s a feature called Code Playback that allows you to watch how test takers build to solve the problems, take notes, and be auto-spotted on any suspicious actions. The report is fairly detail-oriented — you get to see not just the score and duration but a breakdown evaluation of the candidate’s problem-solving skills, language knowledge, design, and reliability. There is also a comparative score, which auto-benchmarks developers against others in their field so you can easily spot the strong candidate.

CodinGame integrates with a few ATSs and HRISs: SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, Workable, Lever, and Taleo. They also offer API access. But you have to pay additional fees for these.

CodinGame is used by many coding-heavy companies, including Facebook, Nintendo, EA, and Warner Bros.

CodinGame starts with a 14-day free trial. After that, you can move on to one of their paid plans:

• Team: Made for growing businesses, the plan costs $300/month when billed annually and comes with 360 tests/year, unlimited users, access to the question bank, 10 custom questions, company branding, and role-based permissions.
• Business: Made for high-volume recruiting, the plan costs $850/month when billed annually and comes with 1,080 tests/year, covers everything from Team, plus unlimited custom questions, ATS integration & API access (additional fees apply), and Single Sign-On user authentication.‍
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan offers everything on previous plans, plus a custom number of tests, a custom question bank, the option to choose whether your data will be stored on EU or US servers, and a dedicated customer success manager. The plan has custom pricing.

Coderbyte’s technical assessment platform used to have a limited built-in library, so it’s good to see the library now is in much better shape with 2,000 challenges and questions. Like many other platforms in this space, it provides assessments, interviews, and take-home projects. But what’s special is that their open-ended questions support 2-min video responses. Do note, though, that there is a limit of 200 video responses per month for each account; you will have to pay for more. Another worth-noting thing about Coderbyte is that it and TestGorrilla are a few players in this space who offer tools to assess product, design, sales, and marketing rather than just software and data science roles. You can also compensate candidates for their completed assessments, with an additional $2 fee per candidate applied.

As for the evaluation part, the platform detects code similarity, copy/paste, and tab switching — common cheating detectors plus some unique tools like title masking (masks challenge titles with generic, random names so candidates can’t easily search the internet for solutions). We also find critical reporting features like auto-grading, playback, benchmarking, anonymization on the platform, and permissions for collaborative assessments within the Coderbyte.

While having relatively affordable plans, we notice that certain features that are typically found within most vendors’ lowest-priced plans, like custom branding, branded domain, or data export, are available as add-ons. They have a free trial, but you have to fill in your credit card info and can only send tests to up to 5 candidates. And if you look for tools to run hackathons or high-volume hiring, the cost for higher concurrency can add up considerably ($299/month for 100 concurrencies).

Over 3000 brands use Coderbyte in their tech hiring processes, such as Microsoft, Intel, Dovetail, Fullstack Academy, Autodesk, and Bridgestone.

Coderbyte offers a 14-day free trial. After the trial, you can opt for the platform’s paid plans priced as below (billed annually):

• Pro plan: $99 per month for unlimited candidates, assessments, admins, assessments & Interviews, full challenge library & custom challenges, multiple choice & open-ended questions, automated grading & reporting, video recordings & responses, cheating detection, and workspaces & permissions.
• Elite plan: $249 per month, offers everything from Pro and all add-ons.
• Add-ons: API Integration & Zapier for $199 per month. Single Sign-On for $199 per month. Custom Branding & Subdomain for $99 per month. Raw data export for $99 per month. Live support chat for $39 per month.‍
• Pay per candidate: You can choose between $350 for 30 candidates or $500 for 50 candidates. Both expire after 1 year.

What we like best when vetting Codility is the platform’s capability to help growing tech businesses hire developers at scale. For those that usually conduct training events for their in-house tech team or recruitment events to hire the best talent at universities, the platform’s CodeEvent product can be a great choice. The coding challenges are easy to set up and accessible to specific people or anybody. Once the event is over, you can go to CodeEvent’s leaderboard and review all participants’ scores auto-calculated by the platform to decide on qualified candidates.

Another part that interests us is that the platform does have some features to evaluate the candidate’s soft skills rather than just coding and technical knowledge. Accessing Codility’s live interviews, you will see there’s a shared editor and whiteboard tools that you can use to interact with the candidate in real time. The candidate can explain how they solve a test case and work with their peer on pair programming using these tools while having an overview picture of their problem-solving skills, communication, and teamwork skills. Codility supports over 90 languages and frameworks, so you can find nearly any popular tech on the platform. It can integrate with some HR Tech and also offers custom API. We tried integrating the tool with LinkedIn Talent Solutions and liked that it let us invite candidates directly from LinkedIn.

Similar to HackerRank, Codility provides various user licenses: administrator, recruiter, engineer, and collaborator, which can be helpful for teams that require better control over user permissions and better collaborative hiring. However, we expected the platform to have a community of developers behind its products, but it doesn’t. Though it still releases new updates and features, from what we’ve experienced with various options in the tech assessment landscape, user-generated product feedback is invaluable here, not to mention having a community means business clients have a built-in talent hub to source from.

Codility is used by many of the world’s biggest brands, including Unity, Zalando, Spotify, American Express, Deloitte, and Intel.

Codility’s pricing is undisclosed. There is no information regarding which types of plans the platform offers on the website, so you have to contact Codility for more details.

CodeSignal combines packs pre-screening, technical screening, and interviewing tools into one platform to help companies ascertain the skill sets of prospective developers and engineers before they’re hired. The platform covers 70+ languages which is a lot. The integrated development environment (IDE) is another thing we (and several developers) give a thumbs up to. The tool’s appearance and functionalities (autocomplete, find references, and jump-to-definition) make it one of the most realistic and closest to developers’ day-to-day work.

Creating a test on CodeSignal is simple. Like almost any other tech assessment we vetted, you can make your own assessment or pick one from the pre-existing library. You can also mark certain tests as templates and use them over time. We don’t like that there’s no native function to send the assessment to a large number of candidates. You have to either do it one by one or use ATS integration for bulk actions. Once an assessment is done, candidates are automatically assigned a coding score that objectively measures their skills. We also noticed that while there isn’t benchmarking in its reporting feature, CodeSignal is among the few platforms that give recruiters the ability to share a candidate’s assessment results with others. The viewers don’t need to log in to the platform to access your shared link, depending on the access type you gave them. We also appreciate that every time an interview is over, CodeSignal will ask the candidate how they felt at the end of their interview.

Compared to competing tools, CodeSignal does better on the integrations front. The platform can integrate with ATSs (Greenhouse, Lever, ICIMS, Oracle, Workday, Taleo, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Ashby, and LinkedIn Talent Hub); automation tools (Prelude, Goodtime, Zapier, Airtable, Slack, and RippleMatch) and more. It also supports SSO, custom API, and webhooks.

CodeSignal is used to hire engineers at companies like Uber, Zoom, Robinhood, Asana, Gusto, Brex, Quora, and Reddit.

CodeSignal doesn't disclose prices upfront. You need to contact their Sales team for a quote.

HackerRank’s developer assessment platform comes with a community of over 18 million developers, 40% of which already assessed. Due to the popularity of HackerRank, several of its test questions are leaked on other websites. Responding to this, the vendor has launched a new feature to automatically detect leaked questions and replace them with new ones.

We’re impressed with how dynamic tech assessments can be on HackerRank. You can create tests from its library, your personal library, or customize your own from scratch. You can also choose other test formats like code reviews — candidates have to review given code and provide suggestions for improvement or assess how they’d perform if they were a part of your development team via role-specific tests. Another cool feature we noticed when testing HackerRank is its diversity and inclusion tool: it lets you keep candidate identities and personal details anonymous, create anonymized interviews, and accommodate candidates with particular needs. It’s rare to find features similar to these in other tech assessment platforms. Do be wary, though, that you may find some grammatical errors in the library. So we’d recommend you get all your questions proofread by your IT people.

As you prepare to send test invites to candidates, HackerRank has an email sample you can customize and save as templates for future use. There is also an option for you to send bulk emails within the tool. Like almost any other tool in this space, HackerRank incorporates plagiarism detection software to detect cheating. The platform also features automated scoring for certain question types. You can review candidates’ scores, compare them to one another, and even benchmark their scores against HackerRank’s community.

HackerRank has over 3000 customers, including brands like Cisco, Twitter, Bloomberg, and VMware.

Since our last review of HackerRank, the platform has changed its pricing. You can still access its free trial plan without entering your card info, but the platform now provides three plans instead of four, with changes in the prices and features as well.

• Starter: This plan costs $100 per month for 1 user, up to 10 attempts per month, 1,000+ assessment questions, and access to Screen & Interview. It charges $10 per additional attempt.
• Individual: This plan costs $250 per month and comes with 5 users, up to 25 attempts per month ($10 per additional attempt apply), 2,000+ assessment questions, and access to Screen & Interview.‍
• Custom: This plan comes has custom pricing and offers a custom number of users, custom attempts, 4,000+ assessment questions, 40+ integrations, SSO, hiring events, access to Screen & Interview, and a customer success team to help configure your account, provide training, optimize your workflow, and provide monthly health checks and quarterly business reviews. However, there are minimum contract requirements for a designated customer success manager.

Byteboard aims to replace your onsite technical interviews more effectively and unbiasedly. We reviewed 16 vendors in this space, but Byteboard’s assessment methodology is unlike anyone else. The assessment has two parts. First is the design document exercise, which requires developers to analyze the given cases, leave questions and observations about what they read, evaluate different options, and make a recommendation with explanations for their thought process. Up next is the code implementation exercise: candidates choose their preferred language and software tools, plan how to implement them, and write code. What’s even cooler about Byteboard that we don’t find in other tech assessment platforms is that it’s Byteboard humans who grade the interview — it’s neither your people nor their bots. All the evaluations are anonymous, and the in-house software engineers are trained to weigh the interviews according to their built-in rubrics.

We talked with some developers who took the Byteboard interview and most of them seemed to enjoy it. The interview, as they shared, feels natural (no interviewers watching during the interview, given cases close to their daily engineering work) and, more importantly, lets them showcase their real skills (problem-solving, systems design, and coding). It’s also worth mentioning that Byteboard interviews are done independently, meaning candidates don’t work directly with other people, including the interviewers and other candidates. So the way the platform tries to evaluate the candidate’s soft skills is through the interview design: tasks require the developer to answer questions, raise their questions for others, and read others’ code.

We browsed Byteboard’s supported languages and frameworks — around 20 were found, which is quite humble to what other tech assessment platforms offer. In case you’re curious about how the tool responds to the blooming of AI tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot, Byteboard mentioned they were considering adding some AI-assisted features and anti-plagiarism tools. For now, there isn’t much built-in tech for such things. We’ll keep a close eye on the platform and keep you posted.

Some of Byteboard’s customers include Lyft, Gordon Food Service, Arcadia, Betterment, PlayVS, Blue Rose Research, and more.

Byteboard’s pricing isn’t publicly disclosed and depends on your hiring needs/frequency.

CoderPad’s technical assessment platform appears is among our top picks for tech assessment software for so many reasons; besides the screening tool, the platform also offers a unique feature for live collaborative interviews. It’s got a live technical interview functionality, letting you observe candidates as they work on a problem and collaborate with your team in real-time in a functional IDE. You can also send candidates a take-home project to test their skills while avoiding any scheduling conflicts. Tests are available in English, French, and Spanish, supporting a variety of over 40 programming languages.

Another thing that caught our attention while testing CoderPad is that it’s one of a few vendors that support businesses in university recruiting. Its Take-home projects are independent coding exercises with optional automated test case scoring, letting employers set up a technical question in a coding environment and then send a link to candidates, in this case, university graduates, to complete on their own time.

CoderPad supports SSO and integrates with Greenhouse, Lever, ICIMS, Ashby, Prelude, Goodtime, SmartRecruiters, and Chrome – which is not so many. To make up for it, the platform provides an open API without an additional charge. But it’s only available for enterprise plans. CoderPad pricing is rather enterprise-geared. But it does offer a free plan with limited features and a free trial for its Team and Business plans.

More than 4000 organizations use CoderPad, including Netflix, Shopify, Databricks, Slack, and Citadel.

CoderPad has four plans:

• Free: This plan is free-of-charge and allows for 2 tests per month.
• Team: This plan costs $300 per month when billed annually and allows for up to 30 tests per month.
• Business: For $850 per month when billed annually, this plan lets you conduct up to 90 tests per month.‍
• Enterprise: This custom plan comes with more pads, API access, a security review, and other Enterprise features. You need to contact CoderPad’s team for a quote.