When PracHub Is the Smarter Free Alternative to HelloInterview
Quick Overview
Compare PracHub vs HelloInterview to find the better interview prep option for your actual hiring loop. This resource explains where HelloInterview is strongest, especially for structured system design learning, and where PracHub is more useful for candidates who need free access to real interview questions across coding, SQL, machine learning, ML system design, behavioral interviews, and company-specific prep. It is written for software engineers, ML engineers, data candidates, and technical job seekers deciding whether they need a paid system design course, a broad free question bank, or both.
Free real interview questions across every role versus a paid, system-design-first course
Let me get the awkward part out of the way first, because if I bury it you'll smell the sales pitch and leave. HelloInterview is better at teaching system design than PracHub is. Not by a little. Its "System Design in a Hurry" course was written by people who actually ran hiring loops at big tech, and you feel that the first time you open it. If system design is the only thing standing between you and an offer, and you have the money, close this tab and go buy it.
Okay. With that said.
Most people who type "HelloInterview alternative" into Google aren't hunting for a better system-design course. They already like the one they found. They're staring at 279 for lifetime, and thinking: I also have a coding round, and an SQL screen, and an ML design loop, and a behavioural panel, and this one course doesn't touch four of those five. Which is exactly the gap PracHub set out to fill. Not to out-teach anyone on architecture. Just to cover every round a real loop throws at you, in one place, for free.
So that's the split. PracHub gives you free coverage of every round. HelloInterview sells you deep system-design instruction. Both can be right. Sometimes in the same week.
You don't lose offers on the round you studied. You lose them on the one you forgot existed.
HelloInterview is a course; PracHub is the filing cabinet
People line these up as direct alternatives. They aren't. One is a course you enrol in. The other is a filing cabinet you open when you need a specific answer.
HelloInterview is the course. It walks you through the material step by step, and a genuinely fair chunk of it is free to read, which I respect. The paid tier is 79 a year, or $279 for lifetime, and that money buys the guided practice, the AI interviewer, and the ranked lists of what specific companies ask most.
One thing worth knowing before you pay: the human mock interviews, the ones with a real engineer on the other end, were wound down at the end of May 2026. If that feature was your reason to reach for the card, check what's actually still live first.
PracHub is the filing cabinet. You don't take a course, you open it, filter to what you need, read the worked solution, and move on. Less "teach me from scratch," more "show me what's coming and let me practise it." That distinction sounds pedantic right up until you're deciding where your money goes.
The other details (74 company guides, the coding editor, level breakdowns like Meta E3 to E6) reinforce the same pattern: one tool spreads wide, the other goes deep on a single spot.
Where HelloInterview is genuinely worth the money
I'll say this plainly.
If you are weak at system design specifically, PracHub's system-design category of questions and solutions is not going to teach you the way a real course does. HelloInterview's structured path, its AI interviewer and tutor, its ranked "most asked at Company X" lists, its behavioural course that's an actual course and not a page of tips: those are good, and I'm not going to squint at them to make PracHub look better.
In the end, a question bank shows you the past papers and a course teaches you to write the answers. That's the choice you're making. It's not a criticism of HelloInterview either: it's a good course that chose to be excellent at one thing instead of okay at ten. Fair choice.
Why free and broad wins for most people
PracHub's core question bank is free to read. Every question has a written solution, and you don't need a subscription to see it. If you cannot or will not pay, honestly, the comparison stops being interesting: the free option just becomes the default, because it's the one you'll actually use. (PracHub has a Premium tier too, 59.99 a quarter, but the questions and answers you came for sit outside the paywall.)
I learned that rule the hard way: paid for a lifetime plan on a different site once, opened it maybe four times, and did most of my real prep on free banks anyway. So now the rule is simple. Pay for a course only when there's a specific round you genuinely cannot crack alone.
On volume: PracHub claims 9,168-plus questions, 5,621 of them tagged to a specific company. HelloInterview lists 5,000-plus. Landing-page numbers are landing-page numbers, and a bank that size will have filler. Some solutions go deep. Some are one-liners that quietly assume you already get it. That's true of any big bank, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
Which is exactly why the tagging matters more than the count. The number on its own is useless. What makes it worth anything is that a bigger, tagged bank is far more likely to cover the round you were about to skip. Filter by company, role, and round, and you route straight past the weak questions to the ones that map to your actual loop. Strip those labels off and more questions just hand you a bigger haystack.
The round you skip is the round that kills you
This is the point I'd tattoo on a new grad if they'd sit still for it.
HelloInterview lives around system design and the SWE rounds next to it. PracHub spreads out: 3,091 coding and algorithms questions with an editor, 583 ML questions plus 225 on ML system design, a dedicated SQL set, a STAR hub for behavioural. SQL and ML and data science get their own homes, not a footnote tucked under "coding."
And I've got this wrong myself. One cycle I went deep on system design, felt sharp walking in, read replicas and cache invalidation right there on the tip of my tongue, and then the loop handed me a SQL round I hadn't touched in months. Fumbled something a second-year student should get. No architecture course was going to save me there, because it wasn't architecture.
It was a second-highest-salary-per-department question. Here's the clumsy version I first reached for:
SELECT MAX(salary) -- top salary
FROM emp -- across every department at once
WHERE salary < ( -- highest one below the max, so "second highest"?
SELECT MAX(salary) FROM emp -- but this max is global, dept ignored
); -- one number back, answering the wrong question
Looks fine for about three seconds, then you notice it ignores the department entirely and hands back a single global number. The window-function version:
SELECT dept_id, salary -- dept and its salary
FROM ( -- rank rows in a subquery first
SELECT dept_id, salary, -- carry both through
DENSE_RANK() OVER ( -- rank the rows
PARTITION BY dept_id -- restart the count inside each department
ORDER BY salary DESC -- top earner in the dept is rank 1
) AS r -- name that rank r
FROM emp -- source rows
) t -- call the subquery t
WHERE r = 2; -- second-highest per department, ties handled
Fifteen minutes of work, and no system-design course covers it, because it's SQL, not architecture. PracHub covers it because PracHub includes the rounds nobody puts on a highlight reel.
How to pick between them
Here's the whole decision, and it's shorter than you'd think.
Start with your recruiter's email, not your comfort zone. Write down the rounds you're actually getting, not the ones you enjoy practising. If system design is on that list and it's genuinely your weak spot and you have budget, buy HelloInterview and work the course end to end, because nothing free gets you there faster. For every other round (coding, SQL, ML design, behavioural) and for seeing the exact questions a company tends to ask, open PracHub, filter by company and role, and grind the tagged set against its solutions. And plenty of people should honestly just do both: HelloInterview to learn the one hard thing, PracHub, free, to cover everything else and to cram company-specific questions the week before. That isn't a fence-sit. It's using each tool for the job it's good at.
Above all, read the real questions for your exact loop before you optimise anything else. Exposure to the round you were about to ignore beats another hour on the round you already own.
FAQ
Is PracHub free? Yes. The core question bank and its written solutions are free to read, no subscription. There's an optional Premium tier (59.99 a quarter), but the questions and answers don't sit behind it.
How much is HelloInterview Premium? 79 a year, or $279 for lifetime. A fair amount of the site, including much of the system-design material, is free to read.
Does PracHub teach system design? It has a system-design category with written solutions, which is good for practice. For learning it properly from scratch, HelloInterview's course does it better.
Should I use both? If system design is your weak round and budget allows, yes. HelloInterview to learn it, PracHub (free) to practise every other round and to see company-specific questions.
Five minutes before your loop
If you've got a loop on the calendar, the quickest move is simple: read the tagged solutions for every round you're actually facing. Filter to your company and role on PracHub and start there.
Prepare for the interview you actually have.
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