Best Developer Assessment Tools - 2023
We talked to 5 industry experts, gathered feedback from real users, and spent over 40 hours on research & demos to bring this guide to you. Time to find out the best technical assessment tools: their pros and cons, screenshots, pricing data, who they are best suited for, and why we picked these vendors!
If thinking back to your last experience conducting a technical skills assessment makes you cringe, it’s a solid signal that your existing tech screening process is in dire need of modernizing.
We’re sorry for bringing back bad memories, but we know you deserve to get your valuable time back. Tests that are tailored for specific technical roles, gamified assessments, automated skills rating and ranking, and on-the-job performance predictions are some of the many things a best-in-class developer assessment tool can do for you, and we bring you just that in this guide. The below technical skills screening platforms allow you to base hiring decisions on the candidates’ real coding skills and relevant competencies, not just what their resumes tell you they’re good at.
Before jumping into the detailed review of each developer assessment tool, let us walk you through what makes us so confident about our software picks.
Best Tech Assessment Platforms
Having been in this space for a while, we’re convinced that the best review for any software category starts with dedicated research. We have faith in our in-house software experts’ abilities, but we don’t overlook the unique value of external industry experts and real users who use the tool in their day-to-day job. Here is how we brought you the curated list of the best developer assessment tools:
- Our in-house HRTech editorial team initial software vetting: We have a structure to follow in our vendor research: first, editors with relevant experience and background gain a comprehensive understanding of the technical skills screening software category. They then need to come up with a list of feature criteria a developer assessment tool should have and find potential tools that meet such criteria. In this case, we found 16 vendors.
- Demos with vendors: Based on the generated criteria and gathered information from vendors’ websites, our editors met with the vendor for a demo and Q&A. We went through the criteria list and asked the vendor to showcase to us what they claimed as their strengths. As always, we didn’t miss this opportunity to detect their weak spots.
- Industry expert input: In addition to our CEO Phil Strazzulla and our two HR Tech Editors — Huda Idris and Anh Nguyen, this guide compiles input from A, B, C, and D. This group represents decades of experience from various perspectives.
- Recruiters and developers shared their experience on the platform: We talked to several users to hear their takes on the tech assessment platform they have used to see whether there’s something we’re missing when testing the products. Also, our editor Anh Nguyen will share some unique experiences she had at her former employer, where she worked closely with tech recruiters to screen candidates using both in-person interviews and coding skills assessment platforms.
- Our in-house team shortlisted the final list: Based on our demo notes, expert input, and thoughts from both recruiter and developer user perspectives, we had our first draft of who the best technical skills screening software is. We finalized the piece by shortlisting the list of best vendors based on their return on investment (ROI) and best use cases, as we believe one: there's no software that’s best for all and two: the best tool equals the best investment.
We pride ourselves on strict editorial standards and use a thorough process to vet and review software before we publish it on the site (and in fact, most vendors we have to end up rejecting). This process includes having our team of HR and recruiting experts use the tool themselves, getting user feedback, and then evaluating the vendor on key metrics like their financial health, customer retention, and responsiveness to customer queries. You can read more about how we evaluate vendors here.
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What we love most about CodinGame is that it enables recruiters to design the technical screening in the form of game-like challenges, making it feel more like fun and less like a test for developers.
PROS
- Gamified technical assessments make the screening round more engaging and enjoyable to candidates than traditional tests.
- Transparent pricing and offers a free 14-day trial.
- Easy to use for both recruiters and developers.
- Supports over 60 programming languages and frameworks.
- Integrates anti-cheat tech and code playback in test reports.
- Auto-scores candidates and compares them to other developers who have taken similar tests.
- You can cancel your subscription yourself from the user account at any time and with no cancellation fees.
- Offer candidates different language options (English, French, or Spanish).
- Supports live interviews.
- CodinGame allows you to deploy gamified technical assessments that are more engaging and enjoyable to candidates than traditional tests.
- CodinGame has transparent pricing and offers free 14-day trials that anyone can sign up for.
- The platform is easy to use and currently supports over 60 programming languages and frameworks.
CONS
- The question library doesn’t have all technologies recruiters need for their assessments. You can create custom questions, but it’s limited to 10 questions only on their most popular pricing plan.
- Not all developers are big fans of gamification. Some find the UI distracting at times.
- Limited built-in integrations. ATS integration & API access are available for higher-priced plans, with additional fees apply.
- Several users complained about the question library not being as extensive or not covering technologies that they needed to test in. CodinGame does allow you to create custom questions but that’s limited to 10 questions only on their most popular pricing plan.
- The platform is currently only available in English, French and Spanish.
- CodinGame currently has limited built-in integrations with third-party ATSs and HRISs, but they’re working on expanding their list of partners and do offer API access for users on the Team plan or higher.
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.
Best For
Medium and large companies - with medium to high volume tech hiring - looking to vet developers’ skills through gamified assessments.
Qualified.io is laser-focused on assessing developers, and they do a great job in providing coding challenges that mimic real-world scenarios and reporting so you can, as much as possible, have a good idea of a candidate's future “on-the-job” performance.
PROS
- You can use pre-built content, which according to developers, resembles real work. You can also customize the coding challenges yourself.
- The auto pre-screening process quickly filters out poor performers.
- Blind reviews to reduce bias in the evaluation process.
- Has a 14-day free trial with up to 5 free assessment results and access to the Team plan features.
- Code playback tool provides insights into the developers’ thought processes and problem-solving abilities.
- The ability to bulk invite candidates.
- Code similarity detection compares similar solutions to flag potentially plagiarized code.
- Allows candidates to provide feedback at the end of a test.
- Reporting includes automated scoring, timing, and detailed benchmarking statistics.
- A dedicated account manager is assigned to customers in all plans.
- You can create customized assessments tailored to the role you’re hiring for.
- There are over 25 programming languages to choose from for assessments.
- The initial screening process is automated, allowing you to quickly filter out unqualified candidates and focus on those with high potential to be a great fit.
- You can try the platform for free for up to 14 days. The free trial includes up to 5 assessment results, and access to many of the Team plan features.
- Candidates appreciate that the platform gives them real-time feedback and a clear understanding of their performance.
CONS
- Over 25 programming languages supported. Some languages are missing.
- Pricing isn’t transparent, and you need to go through the sales team to get the exact quote.
- There currently isn’t a live interview functionality built-in.
- A few users found the code editors to be a little too small.
- Reporting and exporting functionality is a premium feature only available on custom plans.
- Code similarity detection is included in enterprise team plans.
- Integrates with a few ATSs and LMSs. Custom API, Webhooks, and SSO are available for enterprise plans only.
- Only supports English.
- While Qualified.io is a great tool for evaluating technical skills, it may not be as effective at evaluating soft skills, such as communication and teamwork.
- Pricing isn’t transparent and you need to go through the sales team to get a sense of how much it’ll cost you.
- There currently isn’t a live interview functionality built-in
- The interface, though modern looking, is rather busy
- A few users found the code editors to be a little too small
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.
Best For
Medium to large tech businesses and educational orgs looking for a tech assessment tool with strong online testing, reporting, and analytics capabilities, plus a clear instructor dashboard for test takers.
Coderbyte is one of a few tech assessment platforms that supports answers in short video form, screening tests for product, design, sales, and marketing roles besides tech, and transparent pricing plans with unlimited seats.
PROS
- Supports 30+ languages and skills, with over 2,000 challenges and questions in the library.
- Option to enable video responses to open-ended questions.
- Assessments are available for software, data science, product, design, sales, and marketing roles.
- Ability to have applicants record video responses for later review and long-term archival.
- Built-in automated grading and reporting features. Can save custom report views and have them appear on the dashboard.
- The private link lets you send up to 50 email invitations at once with custom welcome emails/screens.
- Built-in plagiarism and cheating detection algorithms.
- Offers a wide range of integrations, including API. Supports SSO.
- Live interviews feature a whiteboard, private notes, and video and audio communication options.
- Pricing is transparent and is relatively cheaper compared to competing platforms. Offers a free 14-day trial. No candidate limits apply to all plans. Option to pay per candidate.
- There’s a plethora of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to choose from.
- You can have applicants record video responses for later review and long-term archival.
- The automated grading and reporting features speed up your evaluation process
- Built-in cheating detection algorithms can automatically detect cheaters.
- The platform’s pricing is transparent and there’s a free 14-day trial you can sign up for.
CONS
- You can only invite up to 5 candidates with your trial.
- While you can invite up to 300 candidates per day, only 50 will be let in to take your assessments. The rest will have to wait in a virtual waiting room and be told to retry taking the tests in a few minutes. Also note that this is an account-wide limit, not a limit per assessment, and you have to pay extra fees to increase your concurrency limits.
- API and Zapier integrations are only available for an additional fee. Integrations with Workable and Greenhouse via Zapier have limited functionally: Greenhouse integration comes with auto-invite candidates to an assessment, and Workable integration lets you auto-post assessment results to a candidate's profile.
- An additional fee applies to access the live support chat.
- Can be costly to conduct large-scale coding events.
- Some standard features are locked behind paywalls.
- Assessment instructions are currently only available in English.
- API and Zapier integrations are only available for an additional fee.
- Certain tests and assessments are considered too easy for high-level jobs.
- An additional monthly or yearly fee is required to access the live support chat.
- Some standard features are locked behind paywalls.
- Assessment instructions are currently only available in English
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.
Best For
Hiring managers that are looking for a tool to pre-screen English-speaking candidates for software, data science, product, design, sales, and marketing roles via online assessments, interviews, and take-home projects.
While also providing live coding interviews and assessment programs, Codility stands out more for their event-hosting capabilities. The platform makes it easy to host your first coding event, whether it’s hackathons for internal training or job fairs for candidate assessment at scale.
PROS
- Whiteboarding during the calls captures how the candidate approaches and solves given challenges.
- Features pair programming in the live interviewing product.
- Over 90 languages and technologies to choose from.
- Integrated plagiarism prevention, fraud detection, IP address logging, and identity verification to prevent possible cheating.
- Ability to host large-scale, gamified coding events.
- Plenty of features, with new ones added regularly.
- Native integrations include ATSs, sourcing tools, HRISs, onboarding systems, and productivity and collaboration apps. You can also create your own using Codility’s API.
- Option to anonymize candidate information from interviewers to reduce screening bias.
- In-app tool to send e-mail invites to candidates either individually or all at once.
- Auto cross-checks candidates' solutions against over 12 million in-app assessments and notifies potential leaked solutions.
- Easy self-cancellation process within the app.
- Provides different user roles: administrator, recruiter, engineer, and collaborator.
- Live coding challenges are available for live interviews
- Over 90 languages and technologies to choose from
- Integrated plagiarism prevention and fraud detection
- You can run large-scale, gamified coding events using Codility.
- Plenty of features, with new ones added regularly
CONS
- Pricing isn’t transparent. Also no longer offers a free trial like it used to.
- Can be costly to startups and budget-minded teams.
- A few users thought the interface was confusing to navigate.
- Currently only supports English.
- Several developers commented they disliked the test time limit as it puts out unnecessary pressure on them.
- Doesn’t have a developer community behind the platform.
- Pricing isn’t transparent and there isn’t a self-sign-up free trial at this time.
- A few users thought the interface was confusing to navigate.
- Built-in third-party integrations are rather limited, however, you can create your own using Codility’s API.
- The platform is currently only available in English.
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.
Best For
Businesses that do volume tech hiring via coding tests, interactive pair-programming sessions, organizations looking to recruit IT graduates through campus hiring events and job fairs, and growing teams requiring regular technical training contests or events for their developers.
CodeSignal is on our list of best tech assessment tools for many reasons, but our top three are: a breadth of languages and frameworks, built-in IDE that makes developers feel at home, and predictive coding score to gauge real-world skills.
PROS
- Great UI that is easy for both recruiters and candidates to navigate.
- Supports 70s languages and frameworks.
- Proprietary “flight simulator” lets candidates work on a full-stack application, complete with databases, APIs, and frontend layers, helping recruiters assess real-world skills in a real-world developing environment.
- Built-in plagiarism detection tech, proctoring, and validated question variations to prevent cheating.
- Developers praised the auto-complete feature in the IDE.
- Ability to replay every keystroke made by a given candidate during a test or interview. This can be shared with the entire hiring team if need be.
- Integrates with ATS, talent management platforms, and automation tools. Also offers custom API, webhooks, and SSO.
- CodeSignal allows companies to create tasks in over 70s languages and install any package or framework.
- To assess real-world skills, in a real-world developing environment, CodeSignal packs a proprietary “flight simulator” solution that lets candidates work on a full-stack application, complete with databases, APIs, and frontend layers.
- The platform features a friendly and well-thought-out UI for hiring teams and developers. Developers have particularly praised the auto-complete feature in the IDE.
- CodeSignal lets you replay every keystroke made by a given candidate during a test or interview. This can be shared with the entire hiring team if need be.
CONS
- Undisclosed pricing. You’ll need to contact their sales team to get a price estimate.
- Doesn’t offer a free plan or free trial.
- Requires ATS integrations to send email bulk. No built-in feature for bulk actions.
- No discussion forum or community to connect developers with one another and share knowledge.
- Currently only available in English.
- Customer support via email, ticket, and knowledge base. No phone support.
- CodeSignal doesn’t publicly list their pricing. You’ll need to contact their sales team to get a price estimate.
- Several developers complained about CodeSignal’s lack of a discussion forum or community to connect with one another and share knowledge.
- The platform is currently only available in English.
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.
Best For
Mid-size and large companies that hire engineers and developers on a frequent basis.
Not many tech assessment platforms offer various options to vet candidates the way HackerRank does — you get coding challenges, peer-review style assessments, real-world projects, and more. Plus, you can compare your candidates’ test scores to over 18 million developers in their community.
PROS
- Pleasant user interface with dark and light modes.
- Supports 40+ languages and frameworks.
- Integrates with 40+ third-party apps: ATS, talent intelligence, scheduling, and productivity.
- Provides three types of licenses with specific actions based on the permissions given: developer, interviewer, and recruiter, which is helpful security and collaboration-wise.
- Transparent pricing. Also offers a free 14-day trial.
- A community of over 18 million developers, with 40% of them already assessed.
- Products are frequently updated.
- Individual self-serve plan subscribers can pause their subscription and resume it when they want right on the platform.
- Built-in diversity and inclusion features.
- Well-developed online support materials for candidates, recruiters, and admin users.
- Uses a third-party content bias checker to provide an unbiased assessment experience.
- Auto detects and removes the leaked questions from the system and replaces them with new questions.
- Integrated plagiarism detection software to detect cheating.
- Ability to send bulk email invites to a test.
- HackerRank has transparent pricing. They also offer a free 14-day trial with an easy sign-up process.
- HackerRank’s community has over 18 million Developers, with 40% of them already assessed.
- HackerRank for Work currently supports over 40 different programming languages.
CONS
- Only Enterprise customers are given access to pre-built integrations and HackerRank’s API.
- Currently only available in English.
- Can be a bit too pricey for startups and small businesses.
- The coding challenges currently don’t cover all languages and frameworks, including Flutter.
- User licenses, while can be helpful for security and collaboration, can also provide challenges regarding management and cost added.
- No preliminary test to check the candidate’s internet connection before the assessment starts.
- Third-party integrations are limited at this time, and only Enterprise customers are given access to pre-built integrations and HackerRank’s API.
- The platform is currently only available in English.
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.
Best For
HackerRank is an enterprise-ready solution, meaning hyper-growing startups and large companies looking to hire software engineers, coders, and developers on a frequent basis are likely to get the most out of their tech assessment tools.
Byteboard interviews let you see multiple facets of candidates: from algorithmic analysis to systems design and coding. The fact that the interviews are graded by humans ensures all the nuances are captured.
PROS
- The evaluation process is done by humans providing detailed explanations of scores given.
- Open-ended technical reasoning exercises get recruiters to see candidates’ ways of thinking when tackling a given challenge.
- Project-based interviews, according to most test takers, are very close to their day-to-day work.
- Assessment rating based on highly structured rubrics that evaluate about 20 software engineering skills.
- Candidates find timed assessments with no live interviewer convenient and less pressure.
- The online job board lets job seekers browse current openings in their fields.
- A skills profile is developed for each candidate within 48 hours of their interview.
- Anonymous interviews, assessments, and evaluations help avoid bias.
- Interviewees can attend interviews on their own time without scheduling conflicts.
- Highly structured rubrics are used to grade candidate assessments.
- The online job board lets jobseekers browse current openings in their field.
- A skills profile is developed for each candidate within 48 hours of their interview.
CONS
- Exporting candidate reports to share internally isn't yet supported, but it's on the roadmap.
- Independent interviews mean no real-time collaboration and communication. Such soft skills are assessed based on what the interviewees answered on the tests.
- Pricing isn’t transparent.
- Their online job board only hosts openings from their clients.
- Integrates with a limited number of applicant tracking systems (ATS).
- Limited supported coding languages.
- Pricing isn’t transparent.
- Their online job board only hosts openings from their clients.
- Byteboard integrates with a limited number of applicant tracking systems (ATS).
- Coding languages supported by Byteboard are somewhat limited.
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.
Best For
Byteboard is ideal for IT companies looking for a human-graded technical assessment solution rather than a bot-scored one for their tech hiring needs.
CoderPad supports interactive coding interviews and take-home projects for assessments that require a deep dive. Live interviews can be recorded and played back by keystroke, which can turn a 30-minute interview into a replay that’s only a few minutes long.
PROS
- Supports 41 languages and frameworks with native libraries.
- Question bank provides question samples from CoderPad, questions created and saved by you and your team. Tests are available in English, Spanish, and French.
- Has a free plan that allows you to conduct up to 2 tests per month. A free 14-day trial is also available.
- Live collaborative coding enables interviewers and candidates to code live together. The interviewers can also write, execute and debug code.
- Playback mode automatically switches between tabs and/or files in the order that happened in the interview, with an option to adjust playback speed from 1x-8x.
- Copy-paste detection spots pasting from sources outside the pad to help you detect potential cheating.
- Supports anonymous access: No candidate sign-up is required to join the interview.
- Take-home projects let candidates complete on their own time.
- Ability to share links to your tests or projects at universities and target recent grads with your recruitment efforts.
- Can cancel at any time from within the platform.
- CoderPad has a free plan that allows you to conduct up to 2 tests per month. A free 14-day trial is also available.
- Tests are available in English, Spanish and French.
- You can conduct live tech interviews and watch candidates code or code with them.
- You can assess candidates through take-home projects that they can complete on their own time.
- The platform enables you to share links to your tests or projects at universities and target recent grads with your recruitment efforts.
CONS
- Some languages don’t have a lot of prebuilt libraries and support.
- Many useful features are locked behind the higher subscription tiers.
- Sometimes the site can be slow and clunky.
- Limited built-in integrations with third-party systems. But it does provide API access.
- Pricing is undisclosed and a bit pricey for startups and small businesses with small hiring needs.
- The whiteboard feature could use some improvement for better usability.
- The how-to guides on the website aren’t very helpful to some users and can be simplified.
- No instruction tab is given after the candidate opens the CoderPad link and enters their name.
- A dedicated customer success manager is available for enterprise customers only. Other plan customers are provided with email support.
- Many useful features are locked behind the higher subscription tiers.
- Several users feel that the interface is complicated and difficult to navigate.
- Limited built-in integrations with third-party systems.
- A few users think the whiteboard feature could use some improvement and allow for file import.
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.
Best For
Businesses that frequently hire for tech roles, ideally medium and large enterprises with a need for interactive technical interviewing and screening. Those targeting university graduates in their recruitment strategies are also likely to benefit from this software.
Benefits of Technical Skills Screening Software
There are several key advantages that talent acquisition teams can reap from using the best technical assessment tools. Like any pre-employment evaluation tool, it is meant to test an applicant’s likelihood of succeeding in a potential role. However, there are specific benefits to this segment of tech skills assessment platforms.
- Virtual interviews: If you’re looking to hire remote engineers, online tech assessments are a great way to continue moving the interview process forward, along with video interviews.
- Time-saving: First, your engineering teams don’t have to spend nearly as much time in the earliest parts of the recruiting cycle. This means software engineers can spend more time coding. In many cases, this increase in productivity is similar to a company hiring 10% more engineers.
- Candidate experience: You can evaluate more applicants because your software engineer screens are now automated. This allows more people to go through the screen and show their coding skills beyond what is on their resumes.
- Better hires: Your engineering team is undoubtedly brilliant, but are they the best interviewers? How many job applicants do they unfairly disqualify in the early days simply because their specialty isn’t hiring? Unbiased coding tests allow you to better assess top job applicants through standardized interview questions that test skills in the programming languages you care about most.
- Diversity hiring: An engineering testing platform evaluates candidates’ skills objectively and isn’t biased by gender, ethnicity, age, or educational pedigree. This means the people with the skills to do the job will make it to the next phase.
- More signal: A resume is a poor proxy for a developer's real capability. Coding tests allow employers to expand their pipeline beyond made-up CVs.
- Easy to get started: Most of these vendors offer free trials. This means you can quickly understand the workflow for a given tool and how it can impact your technical hiring process. We advise having someone from recruiting and engineering involved during any pilot or trial phase, as both organizations need to buy into this initiative.
Tech Skills Assessment Tools: Myths and Pitfalls to Avoid
Online coding tests are a great way to streamline your engineering hiring while producing a meaningful return on investment. That said, we want you to be aware of several misconceptions and pitfalls in the talent acquisition community.
- Screening, not interviewing: Developer assessment tools are great at screening candidates. However, they are not a replacement for the actual interview in your hiring process. Before hiring, you must still understand how someone deals with conflict, compromise, communication, etc. Coding tools are merely the first step.
- Diversity: Ensure you understand how diverse candidates score on your tests. One vendor in this space found their tests were biased against female engineers simply because no females were initially involved in writing the tests. Getting women involved in building the question set fixed this problem.
- Engineer buy-in: Your engineering team needs to trust in these assessments. If they don’t, this solution provides very little value as they’ll still need to spend time doing their screens. Educating the engineering team typically happens from a leader on the recruiting side. Of course, there are hiring managers who lead this change as well. To ensure a successful buying and implementation of the product, get engineering involved when demoing/trialing the product.
- Fraud: Understand how the screening tool you’re using ensures that candidates take the tests themselves and do not post fraudulent scores.
- What’s tested matters: You can customize your coding tests to reflect the specific programming languages and skills relevant to the job. However, what quirks are still being left out? Maybe you only pair programs and need to test this. Possibly there should be a psychometric part of this test or specific aptitudes that need to be measured in addition to skills.
- Tools, not marketplace: These tools enable your recruiting team to vet candidates more effectively. But, they are not sources of candidates like a job board would be (although some of the best tech assessment vendors can help with sourcing).
- Don’t leave humans out: Just because you have a new way to vet software engineers doesn’t mean you can simply let your coding assessment handle all candidate interactions. Like any pre-employment screening, you need to realize candidate experience is essential. Set expectations, sell the person on your culture, and treat them as you’d want to be as an applicant.
Coding Interview Software Pricing
Online technical assessment platform pricing is typically based on the monthly assessments you conduct. We like this because the more interviews you run, the more value you will get.
Pricing starts in the $50 per month range for companies starting with one requisition and can grow into the 6-figure range. Please note that these ranges are meant to give you a general idea of how much you might pay for your organization. However, prices will vary depending on several factors, including the features you need, support levels, the vendors you partner with, HRTech integrations, etc. Also, most of the best online coding assessment platforms we listed in this guide have free trials, some have a free version you can gauge whether it fits your team’s needs.
Key Features of Best Technical Assessment Tools
What does the best-in-class technical skills assessment software do? Here are the most important elements you find in a robust developer assessment platform:
- Testing tools for all popular coding languages: A capable technical skills assessment tool will provide a rich library of questions and challenges that cover a range of programming languages and frameworks for at least top on-demand engineering and developer roles, such as front-end, back-end, full-stack, mobile developer, and data scientist.
- Interview recording: An advantage that makes businesses favor online coding interviews over traditional ones is that the interviews are recorded for further assessment, which results in a more thorough and unbiased candidate evaluation.
- Test customization: Despite the thorough and rich built-in library, you may have unique requirements and assessments for individual roles. And a good tech assessment tool should enable you to do that. It can be the ability to choose different types of questions, create new ones from scratch, or adjust the challenges with your custom data sets and test cases.
- Cheating detection: The weak spot of online coding interviews is that the interviewers cannot closely monitor the candidates during the assessment as they do in the in-person tests. This is where cheating tech gets the spotlight. Solid coding assessment platforms now can incorporate proctoring that allows you to observe the test taker through video during the assessment. They also feature other cheating detectors to prevent tab-switching and plagiarism and can even verify the candidate’s identification.
- Integrations with your existing ATS: Tech assessment tools are usually used by teams with a frequent tech hiring need, meaning they have a medium to a large number of candidates in the technical recruitment pipeline. So, oftentimes, these teams have an ATS they have used for a while already. What happens if the purchased developer assessment tool can’t integrate with your existing ATS? A disaster for both the recruiter and the engineering team indeed. A modern tech skills screening solution should provide effortless integration with your current applicant tracking system so you can centralize all candidate data in one place.
- Scoring and reporting: A technical skills screening platform wouldn’t make much of a difference if, after the tests are done, recruiters and tech managers still had to sit down with an array of individual assessments and manually score each. Most of today’s coding assessment tools offer auto-generated analytics and insights into a candidate’s capabilities based on their test performance. You can either access such data in the platform’s reporting section or right in the dashboard, see candidates’ results at a glance, identify top performers, their benchmarking, and detailed info on their test answers to make data-driven hiring decisions.
Questions To Ask On Demos
You’ll notice a few suggested questions in this spreadsheet already. In addition to talking to a salesperson to vet these vendors, we recommend opening a free account to play around with the code editor. Set up a pre-canned screen for a data scientist or programmer, and see the process they’d go through. Then, take a look at how to screen applicants that are presented to your hiring team.
How does this stack up to other online assessment platforms you’ve looked at? Does it give you the confidence you’ll be able to judge an applicant’s programming skills? What other interview questions can you embed into these skill tests? Make sure you think about this both from the recruiting team’s perspective and the candidate’s.
Companies Using Tech Assessment Platforms: Andela
Andela is a fast-growing company faced with a massive challenge — how do we efficiently find and hire the top 1% of developers across Africa at scale (they get over 4,000 applicants per month)?
Maya Neria, Senior Product Manager, was in charge of figuring out how to replace a homegrown tech assessment platform that wasn’t cutting it with a solution that would mimic the real world while also providing feedback to candidates. After demoing over 100 solutions, Andela selected a tech assessment platform, Qualified, and overhauled their developer screening process.
Andela now starts their interview process by sending applicants a study packet on Python/Javascript basics, tests knowledge of this packet via a simple quiz through Google Forms, and then moves candidates into the tech assessment platform. Currently, 15% of people who pass the tech assessment are hired. Moving to a standardized platform has allowed Andela to save time, improve the candidate experience, and create a more objective scoring rubric for future candidates.
Developer Assessment Tools FAQs
What is a tech assessment?
A technical assessment is a coding test that mirrors the real-world work of a computer engineer at a company and asks the job applicant to complete a series of coding exercises in a developer environment that tests their skills as a programmer.
What is a technical assessment tool?
A developer assessment tool (or technical assessment tool) is a software platform designed to administer coding tests to candidates to see if their skills match the job requirements.
Why use a technical interview tool?
A technical interview tool acts as a screening tool for developers. By testing different language proficiencies at the beginning of the talent acquisition funnel, hiring teams can narrow their list of the best candidates much faster.
Can a coding assessment platform help with recruiting?
Yes, a coding interview platform can significantly help recruiting efforts. In addition to fastening the hiring process by systematically pre-screening candidates, developer assessments can reduce bias by objectively testing skills, allow for remote interviewing, and give better signals on skills beyond what a resume shows.
What different kinds of coding assessment platforms are there?
Depending on who you are evaluating, there are different technical skill screening platforms. Some solutions are focused on the top 1% of software engineering talent. Others offer more general coding challenges. Some focus on an academic assessment, others on real-world problems. It all depends on your company’s hiring angle.
Final Advice on Tech Assessment
Any company hiring more than a few engineers a year should take a look at using a tech assessment platform. They save your engineering team time. They lead to better hires. And, most are very simple to do a pilot with. You can get a 30 minute demo of one of our pre-vetted vendors to understand how this will fit into the specifics of your recruiting process:
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