Comparing
A free alternative to the interview platforms.
CoderPad, HackerRank and CodeSignal are hiring platforms: a question bank, scoring, an ATS integration, a per-seat plan. Cocode is the live room on its own. It costs nothing, and neither of you needs an account, not even the interviewer. Signing in is optional, and the only thing it does is let you save a problem to reopen later. Here is what that gets you, and what it does not.
What Cocode does
Your problem becomes the test suite
Paste a coding problem in plain English and Cocode writes the starting code and a test suite from the examples in it. No question bank, no writing tests by hand before the call.
The tests are checked before you see them
Every generated suite is run against a reference solution first, so a red test means the candidate is wrong rather than the question being broken.
The rest is what you would expect: a shared editor with live cursors, video in the same tab, tests that run in a sandbox on demand, and TypeScript, JavaScript, Python or Rust. Rooms are ephemeral, so nothing about the session is kept once you close the tab. Only a problem you chose to save outlives it.
What Cocode does not do
If one of these is how your team hires, buy a platform instead. Better to know now than halfway through an interview.
- There is no recording, no transcript and no code history. Anyone who missed the interview has to take the interviewer’s word for how it went.
- You cannot compare two candidates inside the tool. No scorecards, no rubrics, nothing to fill out afterward.
- It does not connect to the rest of your hiring stack. No ATS integration, no calendar, no API.
- Cocode builds a problem out of what you paste. It will not hand you a vetted question bank with difficulty ratings and candidate benchmarks.
- Everything happens live, so there is nothing to send a candidate to do on their own time.
- Nobody checks for plagiarism or AI use. That is on you.
- Two people per room. Panels and shadowing are out.
- Nothing is stored unless you sign in and save a problem. Even then, only the problem is kept, never the session. If you need a paper trail for compliance, this is the wrong tool.
When it is the right tool
A handful of interviews
A few candidates a quarter does not justify a per-seat plan, and getting one approved takes longer than the interviews do.
Your own problem
If you would rather ask about work your team actually does than pick from a bank, you need something that turns your problem into a runnable one.
Practice with a friend
Two people taking turns, with no company involved.
Try it before you compare it.
There is nothing to sign up for. Paste a problem, send the link, and see what the room is like.