HackerEarth

What it is

HackerEarth is a technical-assessment platform that sells two things on separate price cards: Skill Assessments, a coding-test product with FaceCode live interviews bundled in, and OnScreen, an AI interviewer launched in April 2026 that runs first-round technical interviews with a video avatar at any hour. The company is independent, backed by DHI Group (the owner of Dice), and claims a developer community of more than 10 million and coverage of 1,000+ skills across 40+ programming languages.

OnScreen is the reason HackerEarth matters again in 2026. Every session starts with government-ID verification, a face match against that ID, and a liveness check. Proctoring runs during the interview rather than as a post-hoc review, and flags proxy attempts, tab switching, and identity mismatches. Scoring is rubric-based with automated code execution, and answers the model is unsure about are routed to a human reviewer instead of being scored down. HackerEarth scopes it to first-round interviews for individual-contributor engineers. Senior, system-design, and whiteboard rounds stay with people.

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

• It answers the 24/7 first-round question directly. A candidate who applies at 11 p.m. on a Friday can finish a structured technical interview before Monday. HackerEarth cites one enterprise customer that screened more than 2,000 candidates in a weekend. That is a vendor claim, but the capacity logic holds: the bottleneck in a high-volume funnel is engineer calendar time, and OnScreen removes it from round one.
• Identity checks are built in, not bolted on. Proxy interviewing and deepfake candidates are the fraud pattern teams now plan for (see AI interview fraud). Running KYC-style ID, face match, and liveness inside the same session as the interview closes the gap a separate identity vendor leaves open.
• It has the lowest published per-candidate price among the major platforms. Both assessment tiers and both OnScreen tiers sit on the public pricing page, with a 30-day trial, so a first technical hire does not wait on a sales cycle.

Pricing

Verified against hackerearth.com/recruit/pricing on 2026-10-25.

Skill Assessments

• Growth — $990/year billed annually (120 credits, about $83/month) or $99/month billed monthly (10 credits/month). One admin, a 5,000+ question library, FaceCode, plagiarism detection, full-stack and GenAI skills, and psychometric tests.
• Scale — $3,990/year billed annually (300 credits, about $333/month) or $399/month billed monthly (25 credits/month). Unlimited admins, a 20,000+ question library, video responses, AI-based plagiarism checks, ATS integrations, and calendar integrations.
• Enterprise — custom. Adds custom credits, the full 25,000+ question library, global candidate benchmarking, API access, roles and permissions, and SSO.

OnScreen (AI interviewer)

• Growth — $1,290/year (120 interview invites) or $129/month (10 invites/month).
• Scale — $4,990/year (600 invites) or $499/month (50 invites/month). Adds custom roles, realtime code evaluation, premium support, and SSO.
• Enterprise — custom. Adds custom question development, a dedicated account manager, and SLAs.

The per-candidate math. Growth works out to $8.25 a credit, below Codility’s $10 and well below HackerRank Starter’s $15.80. Scale is $13.30 a credit, and at $3,990 it is the cheapest published tier in this group that carries ATS integrations: HackerRank Pro costs $5,028 and CodeSignal Grow costs $5,748. OnScreen Scale comes to $8.32 per AI interview, against $9.98 on monthly billing.

Best for

• Talent acquisition leads at companies hiring 20–50 engineers a year who want ATS write-back without an enterprise quote, using Scale
• High-volume or campus hiring teams whose first technical round is gated by interviewer availability across time zones, using OnScreen
• Teams that have seen proxy candidates and want identity verification inside the interview itself

Alternatives and when to pick them

• HackerRank — the category leader by customer count. Pick it when your process assumes candidates use AI and you want to score how they direct it: its agentic IDE and AI Fluency score have no HackerEarth equivalent.
• CodeSignal — the other major platform. Pick it when you need AI interviewers for product, design, and go-to-market roles as well as engineering; OnScreen covers engineering only.
• Karat — pick it when you want human interviewers on the first round instead of an avatar, and the budget to pay per interview for them.
• Codility — pick it when you need MCP task authoring below enterprise pricing; HackerEarth has no MCP server, and its API sits on Enterprise.

Watch-outs

• Growth has one admin seat. A hiring panel of five engineers cannot each open reports on their own login. Guard: if more than one person reviews submissions, budget for Scale’s unlimited admins from the start rather than discovering the cap in week two.
• OnScreen’s evaluation model is not disclosed. HackerEarth’s own materials say the model architecture and training data are not public, which matters under NYC LL 144 and the EU AI Act if the score informs a hiring decision. Guard: request a bias audit and the rubric for each role before rollout, keep a human reviewer on every reject, and pair OnScreen with structured interviews in later rounds.
• Assessments and OnScreen bill separately. Running both on Scale costs $8,980 a year. Guard: price the combined line before comparing against a single-product quote from a competitor.
• Credit consumption rules are not spelled out on the pricing page. Guard: confirm in writing whether an invite a candidate never opens consumes a credit, and what the per-credit overage rate is, before choosing annual billing.
• AI-assistant detection is less documented than identity checks. HackerEarth’s 2026 materials mark the scope of Smart Browser’s AI-assistance detection as pending confirmation. Guard: run a pilot cohort with a known AI-assisted test-taker and check what the integrity report actually flags.