CoderPad

What it is

CoderPad is the shared editor most engineers picture when someone says “live coding interview”: a browser pad where interviewer and candidate write, run, and debug the same code in real time. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, it now sells two products under one login. Interview is the original live pad — multi-file projects, 99+ languages by the vendor’s count, and full session playback. Screen is the async assessment side, and it is not home-grown: it is CodinGame for Work, which CoderPad acquired in October 2021 and later renamed, which is why some Screen pages still live on codingame.com. A third product, Qualify, runs async video first-round screens scored by an AI reviewer against your rubric; it is not on the public price list. CoderPad claims 4,000+ customers and names Shopify, Meta, OpenAI, Spotify, LinkedIn, and Goldman Sachs among them.

The buying question this page answers: do you need a live-coding pad or a take-home assessment platform? CoderPad is the vendor that was built pad-first, and that origin shows both in what it does best and in what it gates.

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

• The live interview is the product, not an add-on. HackerRank, CodeSignal, and Codility each ship a live-interview module next to an assessment library. CoderPad inverts that ratio. Interviewers get the pad engineers already know, candidates get a real environment instead of a test harness, and the vendor reports that 96% of candidates finish its assessments — a vendor number, but consistent with the pad’s standing among candidates.
• AI in the pad, with the prompts on the record. AI Assist puts an LLM beside the code on every plan, switched on by default. Per CoderPad’s docs (updated July 2026), candidates can choose GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama 4 Maverick, and others; agentic runs with Claude Code and Codex are Enterprise-only. The docs say every prompt and response is saved to playback, so the debrief can score how the candidate directed and checked the model, not whether they touched it. An interviewer-only Private AI Assist drafts follow-up questions about the candidate’s own code.
• Interview Designer turns a job description into questions. Listed on Team and Enterprise as of September 2026, it generates role-specific exercises and variants of them — the practical answer to question banks that leak onto prep sites.
• Screen-then-interview on one contract. From the Team tier up, a candidate can take a Screen test and move into a live Interview pad without a second vendor or a second candidate login.

Pricing reality

Checked against coderpad.io/pricing on 10 September 2026. Every plan includes unlimited users and AI Assist; there are no seat charges.

• Starter — $80/month billed annually ($960/year, 60 interviews or tests), or $120/month on monthly billing (5 per month). 400+ question library, 10 custom questions.
• Team — $400/month billed annually ($4,800/year, 360), or $500/month on monthly billing (30 per month). Adds Interview Designer, take-homes and auto-scored screens, a 1,400+ question library, and 100 custom questions. The Team plan card is also the one that lists prompt capture and playback by name.
• Enterprise — quote-only, volume-based, no credits. Adds ATS integrations, SSO/SAML, API access, webcam proctoring with AI behavior analysis, real-time cheating alerts, AI summaries and interview transcripts, and a 4,000+ question library.

Annual billing works out to $16.00 per interview on Starter and $13.33 on Team. Monthly plans pay $30 per interview over quota. Annual plans have no overage: exceed the yearly quota and CoderPad automatically renews you onto another full plan and resets the billing date. That makes the Starter-versus-Team decision exact. Four Starter cycles cost $3,840 for 240 interviews; the fifth takes you to $4,800, which is the price of Team with 60 fewer interviews. If you expect more than 240 interviews a year, buy Team.

A test counts when the candidate starts it. A live pad counts when two people join and write code, and pads deleted within 28 days of creation are re-credited.

Real-world band: Vendr’s data across 69 purchases puts the median contract at $15,000 a year, in a range of $4,090 to $28,176, at an average discount near 13%. The median sits roughly three times above Team’s list price because the integrations most TA teams need are sold only on Enterprise.

Best for

Engineering managers and TA leads hiring roughly 20 to 300 engineers a year, where the live pair-programming session is the stage that decides the hire, and who want to allow AI in that session while keeping a full record of how the candidate used it.

Not for you if your bottleneck is screening throughput — hundreds of applicants to cut before any human interview — or if you need scores written back to your ATS without signing an Enterprise contract.

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• HackerRank — the largest platform in the category by customer count. Pick it when you need ATS write-back below enterprise pricing: its Pro tier at $5,028/year includes Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby integrations, which CoderPad sells only on Enterprise.
• CodeSignal — pick it when the async assessment is the decision stage and you want a portable 200-600 score, or when you also screen go-to-market roles with AI interviewers. Its Grow tier includes basic ATS integrations.
• Codility — pick it for the lowest entry price per candidate: Starter is $1,200/year for 120 invites, $10 each, but it caps you at one platform user.
• Karat — pick it when engineer interview hours are the constraint. Karat supplies the interviewers; CoderPad supplies the pad for yours.
• micro1 and Apriora — the fastest-growing entrants in the adjacent AI-interviewer segment. Pick them to replace the first human screen entirely; CoderPad’s answer there is Qualify, which is quote-only.

The rule: if the hire is decided in a live session, start with CoderPad. If it is decided by an async score before anyone meets the candidate, start with a take-home-first platform and use its live module.

Watch-outs

• ATS, SSO, and API are Enterprise-only. On Starter and Team, results stay in CoderPad and recruiters copy them across by hand. Guard: if write-back to Greenhouse or Lever is a requirement, get the Enterprise quote before the trial starts and compare it with HackerRank Pro, not with CoderPad Team.
• Annual overflow buys a whole new plan. Interview 61 on annual Starter triggers another $960 renewal and moves your billing date. Guard: check usage in the admin dashboard every month, and choose Team up front once the hiring plan clears 240 interviews.
• Live-interview integrity is thinner than the plan names suggest. Tab-exit logging and paste flagging run in every pad, but webcam proctoring and real-time cheating alerts are Enterprise features, and a browser pad cannot see a second monitor or apps outside the browser. Guard: require camera-on screen sharing, and spend the last ten minutes on follow-up questions about the candidate’s own code — the part a hidden helper cannot answer for them.
• AI Assist is on by default. A score from an AI-on pad is not comparable to one from an AI-off pad. Guard: set the org-wide default deliberately, state the AI policy in the candidate invite, and calibrate the rubric with your own engineers working in the same mode.