Free LeetCode Alternatives — Best Free Coding Interview Practice

LeetCode Premium costs $35 per month or $159 per year. For a software engineer targeting a FAANG offer worth $200,000–$400,000 total compensation, that sounds like a bargain. But the uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of candidates — including many who receive offers from Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft — prepared entirely with free resources. The paywall is real, but its impact on outcomes is far smaller than the marketing implies.

The core of interview preparation has always been problem-solving repetition, pattern recognition, and efficient recall under pressure. None of those skills require a Premium subscription. What LeetCode Premium actually provides is a narrower set of features than most candidates assume: primarily company-specific problem tagging, a handful of additional problems not on the free tier, and a mock interview scheduling feature. The free tier of LeetCode alone gives you access to over 2,500 problems — more than any person can fully solve in a typical 2–3 month prep window.

This guide covers everything you can get for free: the free LeetCode tier itself, the curated problem lists that have become the de facto interview curriculum, alternative platforms that are entirely free, and the YouTube and open courseware resources that rival any paid course. It also covers the specific scenarios where Premium is genuinely worth purchasing — because there are some. The goal is to help you make a rational decision about where to spend your preparation time and money, starting with the truth that free leetcode prep is entirely viable for the vast majority of engineering candidates.

LeetCode's free tier is far more capable than most candidates realize before they hit a Premium paywall for the first time. The free tier includes access to over 2,500 problems spanning Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty — covering every algorithmic topic tested in software engineering interviews: arrays, strings, linked lists, trees, graphs, dynamic programming, sliding window, binary search, and more. The volume of free problems alone is not the bottleneck for any reasonable preparation timeline.

LeetCode's free tier includes 2,500+ problems with no paywall on individual problems — the Premium subscription primarily adds company-specific problem tagging and additional practice problems. You can filter free problems by topic tag (Array, Tree, DP, Graph, etc.), by difficulty, and by acceptance rate. The discuss forums are fully accessible on the free tier, and they are one of the most valuable parts of LeetCode — the community explanation threads for hard problems routinely include multiple solution approaches, complexity analyses, and pattern generalizations that rival any editorial.

What the free tier does NOT give you: per-company problem tagging (seeing which problems Facebook, Google, or Amazon have asked in the last 6 months), the full set of Premium-only problems (approximately 150–200 problems not on the free tier), the mock interview scheduling feature, and official editorial solutions for some problems. These are real limitations — but they are not blocking limitations for a well-structured free preparation approach.

The single most impactful development in free interview preparation over the last five years has been the emergence of curated problem lists. Instead of randomly grinding through LeetCode's 2,500+ problem catalog, these lists distill the most pattern-representative problems into a focused set that a candidate can complete in 4–8 weeks. The three lists with the highest community adoption are Blind 75, NeetCode 150, and Grind 169 — and all three are entirely free.

The Blind 75 originated as an anonymous post on the Blind career forum, where a software engineer shared the 75 LeetCode problems they believed were most representative of FAANG interviews. The list immediately went viral and has since become the de facto baseline for interview preparation. It covers 13 categories — arrays, binary, dynamic programming, graphs, intervals, linked lists, matrices, strings, trees, heap, and more — and every problem on it is available on LeetCode's free tier.

The Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 problem lists are entirely free — and between them, they cover approximately 80% of the algorithmic patterns tested in FAANG-level interviews. NeetCode 150 is an expansion of the Blind 75 created by NeetCode (Navdeep Singh), a YouTuber who built a curated extension covering additional patterns including advanced graphs, bit manipulation, and 2D DP. The Grind 75 and Grind 169 (created by Yangshun Tay, a Meta engineer and creator of the Tech Interview Handbook) are algorithmic extensions that add more variety while maintaining the pattern-focused philosophy.

LeetCode itself offers free study plans — 'LeetCode 75' and topic-specific learning paths — that provide structured paths through free problems. These are less community-validated than Blind 75 or NeetCode 150 but are a reasonable alternative for candidates who prefer an official, structured format.

Beyond LeetCode itself, several platforms offer free algorithm and coding practice that is directly applicable to interview preparation. Each has a different strength: HackerRank is the most widely used for company online assessments, CodeSignal has the most interview-realistic timed environment, and Codeforces has the deepest competitive programming catalog for candidates who want to push beyond interview-level difficulty.

HackerRank is fully free for individual practice and is the platform used for online assessments by hundreds of companies including Goldman Sachs, Cognizant, and many mid-market tech firms. Its problem library covers data structures, algorithms, SQL, and language-specific challenges. Practicing on HackerRank is directly useful because it familiarizes you with the exact environment — editor layout, input parsing, test case runner — that you will encounter in many real company OAs.

CodeSignal (formerly CodeFights) offers a free practice mode with a scoring system and timed assessments that mimic the actual interview-style OA format many companies use. Its General Coding Assessment (GCA) is used by companies including Robinhood, Brex, and others. The free tier gives access to practice problems and a limited number of GCA attempts. AlgoExpert offers a small free tier with a handful of problems, though its full catalog requires a paid subscription.

Codeforces is the premier free competitive programming platform and is entirely free. Its problem archive contains tens of thousands of problems ranging from beginner to research-level difficulty. For interview purposes, Codeforces problems in the 800–1400 rating range correspond roughly to LeetCode Easy–Medium. Codeforces is overkill for most interview prep timelines, but its regular contests (Div. 2 and Div. 3) are excellent for building speed and accuracy under time pressure.

The free resource ecosystem for algorithm and data structure learning has never been stronger. Three free resources stand out as genuinely excellent for interview preparation at the FAANG level: NeetCode's YouTube channel, Back to Back SWE's YouTube channel, and MIT OpenCourseWare's 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms.

NeetCode (Navdeep Singh) has built the most comprehensive free algorithm explanation library on YouTube. His channel includes video walkthroughs for every problem in the NeetCode 150 list, organized by topic and difficulty. The explanations are clear, concise, and consistently show both the brute-force approach and the optimal solution — exactly the progression interviewers expect to see. The channel is free, the companion website (neetcode.io) is free for the problem lists, and together they constitute the highest-ROI free preparation resource available.

Back to Back SWE is a YouTube channel by Benyam Ephrem that covers algorithm fundamentals with exceptional conceptual depth. Where NeetCode excels at problem walkthroughs, Back to Back SWE excels at explaining why algorithms work the way they do — building the intuition that allows you to generalize patterns to unseen problems. His videos on dynamic programming, segment trees, and graph algorithms are particularly strong. The channel is entirely free.

MIT OpenCourseWare's 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms (available at ocw.mit.edu) is the most rigorous free algorithm curriculum available. Lecture notes, problem sets, and exams from MIT's actual algorithms course are posted publicly at no cost. For candidates with time and a preference for theoretical grounding, 6.006 is a legitimate substitute for any paid algorithm course. The mathematical rigor is higher than interview prep requires, but the depth of understanding it builds pays dividends in system design and follow-up questions.

Having made the case for free preparation, it is worth being precise about the scenarios where LeetCode Premium genuinely provides interview ROI. The clearest case is candidates targeting a specific FAANG company with 4+ weeks of preparation time remaining. Company-tagged problem lists — updated by the LeetCode community based on recent interview reports — allow you to filter problems to those most recently asked at a specific company. If you are interviewing at Meta in 6 weeks, the ability to see that Meta has recently asked Two Sum II, Merge K Sorted Lists, and Alien Dictionary is genuinely useful signal that the free tier cannot replicate.

The mock interview scheduling feature is the second legitimate Premium benefit. The ability to simulate a timed, no-hints, LeetCode-style interview session — without the escape hatch of checking hints or discuss — builds the pressure tolerance that distinguishes candidates who perform well in actual interviews from candidates who perform well in practice but freeze under real conditions. This feature can be approximated for free (set a timer, close the browser, do not check hints), but the structured mock interview environment has real value for candidates who struggle with interview anxiety.

Premium editorials are the third defensible use case. For Hard problems in particular, community discuss explanations vary significantly in quality, while official editorials are consistently well-structured with multiple approaches and complexity analysis. If you are targeting a company known for Hard-tier problems (Google, Jane Street, competitive programming-heavy companies), the editorial quality improvement for Hard problems is worth the subscription cost.

The honest summary: LeetCode Premium is worth purchasing if (a) you are targeting a specific FAANG company and have 4+ weeks of dedicated prep time, (b) you struggle with interview anxiety and need the structured mock interview feature, or (c) you are targeting Hard-difficulty companies and want consistent editorial quality. For the majority of candidates — especially those preparing for non-FAANG companies or with less than 4 weeks — the free tier combined with Blind 75 and NeetCode resources is fully sufficient.

The most important takeaway from this guide is that the free resources available for coding interview preparation in 2024 are genuinely excellent — not merely adequate substitutes for paid resources, but in several cases superior to what a Premium subscription provides. The Blind 75 and NeetCode 150 were built by practitioners who deeply understood what FAANG interviews actually test. NeetCode's video explanations are among the clearest algorithm walkthroughs produced in any format, free or paid. MIT 6.006 is more rigorous than any interview prep course on the market. The free ecosystem is rich.

The recommended free preparation stack is: Blind 75 or NeetCode 150 as your problem list (both at neetcode.io, both free), NeetCode YouTube for video explanations when stuck, HackerRank for OA environment familiarity, and LeetCode's free discuss forums for community solution approaches. This stack covers everything needed for interviews at the vast majority of tech companies — including FAANG — without spending a cent.

If you are 4+ weeks out from a FAANG interview and you have the budget, a one-month LeetCode Premium subscription ($35) at the final stage of preparation for company-tagged problem access is a defensible investment. But it should be the last step of a preparation plan built almost entirely on free resources — not the first purchase before you have solved your first Blind 75 problem.

YeetCode is free and adds spaced repetition to your preparation — surfacing problems at optimal review intervals so you retain algorithm patterns across a multi-week preparation window. Combined with Blind 75 and NeetCode 150, YeetCode's spaced repetition layer addresses the single biggest failure mode in free interview prep: solving a problem correctly once, then failing to recall the pattern weeks later when it appears in a real interview. The free stack is complete. Start today.