The honest answer: the patterns are free, and the paid product is now three different products. Grokking the Coding Interview genuinely invented pattern-first interview prep, and the idea was right. But the course now lives in two homes advertising two different pattern counts, and the same publisher's blog advertises two more. If you want the patterns, you can have them for nothing.
Disclosure: we run AlgoEngineer and sell a live DSA cohort, so we are one of the options below. I have priced ourselves in the same table as everyone else and told you where the free stack beats us. Read the reasoning, not the pitch.
Credit where it's due
Before any of the criticism: Grokking changed how people prepare. The dominant advice in 2018 was "grind 500 LeetCode problems." Grokking's argument — that the questions collapse into a small number of reusable shapes, and that you should learn the shape rather than the question — is correct, and it is now so thoroughly absorbed into the ecosystem that every alternative in this post is downstream of it. AlgoMonster, NeetCode's roadmap, Sean Prashad's list and our own pattern guide all exist in the world Grokking made.
That is exactly why the product's current state is worth examining rather than shrugging at.
First: say which Grokking you mean
This is the single most common error in every comparison article on this keyword, so let me be precise. As of my checks on 9 August 2026:
- The DesignGurus course — "Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions" — lists 40+ coding patterns across 50 chapters, at $197 one-time for lifetime access on its own course page.
- The Educative course — "Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns" — advertises "28 Non-negotiable Coding Patterns" in Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, C++ and C#. Its price did not render for an automated read, so I am not quoting one.
- The DesignGurus blog articles, which are marketing for the course and are what most people actually land on, publish different numbers again — see below.
Same lineage, three artifacts, three counts. A review that says "Grokking has 20 patterns" is describing none of them accurately.
The alternatives at a glance (2026)
| Option | What it actually is | Price (checked at source) | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grokking (DesignGurus) | Pattern course, 40+ patterns / 50 ch. | $197 lifetime · roadmap bundle $341 | ❌ | The original, from its current owners |
| Grokking (Educative) | Pattern course, 28 patterns, 6 languages | Not shown to me — verify yourself | ❌ | Read-and-run learners, multi-language |
| Sean Prashad's list | 179 questions grouped by pattern | Free, open source | ✅ | The patterns with no purchase at all |
| NeetCode | Curated roadmap + video walkthroughs | Free · $119/yr · $297 lifetime | ✅ | Structure plus video, mostly free |
| AlgoMonster | Keyword→technique table + drills | Free tier · $99/yr · $189 lifetime | ✅ | Recognition cues over a numbered list |
| Hello Interview | System-design guides + mocks | $47/mo · $79/yr · $279 lifetime | ✅ | System design, not coding patterns |
| AlgoEngineer (us) | Live cohort + weekly mock interviews | $499 one-time (DSA) | ❌ | Feedback on reasoning, which none above buy |
DesignGurus prices checked on its own pages 9 August 2026; that site labelled its discounts as regional, so your figures may differ. AlgoMonster, NeetCode and Hello Interview checked 8 August 2026 — each displayed a discounted price alongside a struck-through list price ($198/$378, $199/$599 and $99/$349 respectively) simultaneously, on an ordinary day. Treat the struck-through numbers as decoration and re-check on the day you buy.
The finding that should change how you read any pattern course
Here is something you can verify in four browser tabs, and it is the reason I am not sending you to a pattern course by default.
DesignGurus cannot reproduce its own pattern list. On 9 August 2026 I read two of its articles. One opens "here are the top 20 coding interview patterns discussed in Grokking the Coding Interview" and gives twenty — with backtracking at #15, monotonic stack at #19, and "multi-threaded" at #20, which is not a coding-interview pattern in any meaningful sense. A second article on the same site gives 10, and closes by pointing readers to "the complete guide to all 42 coding interview patterns." Meanwhile the course page says 40+, and the Educative sibling says 28.
Ten, twenty, twenty-eight, forty-plus, forty-two. From one product family, in one week.
And the twenty-item list is not merely inconsistent, it is missing things I would not sit an interview without: union find, trie, greedy and prefix sum all appear nowhere in it. Prefix sum in particular is a two-line implementation with a clean recognition signal and an entire family of problems behind it.
None of that makes Grokking bad. It makes the number marketing rather than a finding — which is the point. Our own 16 coding interview patterns guide walks through the whole comparison, including which entries I cut and why, and lands on a deliberately un-round number for exactly this reason.
(Related: Educative's marketing has long carried a claim that roughly 87% of questions come from 10–12 core patterns. That is their figure, published without a method, sample or date. Cite it as marketing if you cite it at all; I would not build a study plan on it.)
The options, honestly
Grokking on DesignGurus ($197 lifetime). Genuinely the deepest single pattern treatment on the list, from the people who built the idea, with a code environment and a coherent sequence. If you want one paid artifact that walks the patterns end to end and you learn well from structured reading, this is a defensible purchase. The trade: it is one-time-expensive relative to free alternatives that cover the same recognition skill, and the pattern inflation above means some "patterns" are single memorised problems wearing a title.
Grokking on Educative (28 patterns, six languages). The better fit if you want the material in Go or C# rather than Python and Java, or if you already hold an Educative subscription. It is the same read-and-run format. I could not read a price, so verify before buying — and note that our Educative alternatives post covers the platform question separately from the course question, which are not the same decision.
Sean Prashad's leetcode-patterns (free, open source). 179 questions grouped by pattern with a constraints-to-technique decision guide. It is not a course — there is no teaching, no video, no sequence — but as a pattern index it does the job the paid lists do, honestly and for free. If money is the constraint, start here and stop reading.
AlgoMonster (free tier · $99/yr). Its keyword-to-technique page is the sharpest thing in this category: "substring" → sliding window, "next greater" → monotonic stack, "all combinations" → backtracking. Crucially, it declines to publish a total count, which after the section above should read as integrity rather than an omission.
NeetCode (free · $119/yr). The best free structure-plus-video stack. If your problem with Grokking was that text does not stick, this is the swap.
Hello Interview ($79/yr). Not a coding-patterns alternative at all — it is system design. Included because it appears in every "Grokking alternative" list, and Grokking's system design course is a different product from the coding one. Do not let a list conflate them.
AlgoEngineer (us, $499 one-time). Live cohort, weekly mocks, one-time fee. We are not an alternative to a pattern course in the like-for-like sense — we are the layer above it. Our first cohort starts 4 October 2026, so we have no graduates and no outcome data to show you, and if you have not yet done serious reps, buying live instruction is premature.
Who should pick what
- You want the patterns and nothing else: Sean Prashad's list, free. Add LeetCode for volume. Do not spend money on this.
- You want structure and video: NeetCode's free roadmap; upgrade only if the paid walkthroughs are what is missing.
- You want recognition cues rather than a numbered syllabus: AlgoMonster's keyword table.
- You want the original, taught end to end, and $197 is fine: Grokking on DesignGurus — go in knowing the pattern count is marketing.
- You need it in Go, C# or C++: the Educative edition.
- You know the patterns and still fail interviews: that is not a content gap and no course fixes it. It is feedback on how you reason out loud, which means mocks — our live DSA cohort is built for exactly that, and the broader live cohort comparison covers the alternatives to us fairly.
The uncomfortable summary: the reason to leave Grokking is rarely that a competitor teaches better patterns. It is that reading a list of patterns — any list, at any price, of any length — is the easy half. The half that decides interviews is looking at a problem you have never seen and naming the shape out loud before you write code, and nothing on this page except a live mock actually trains that.
Get each new comparison and pattern breakdown as it publishes — one email per post, nothing else.
Amit Singh is a Senior SDE at Amazon, a Claude Certified Architect, and the instructor at AlgoEngineer.