Educative vs LeetCode for your long-term career growth
Tags: career, productivity, performance
Published: 2022-04-28 20:58:16

When it comes to platforms for coding interview preparation, there are many options to choose from. Ideally, you want to make an informed choice, but **you should really be spending your time practicing interview questions**, not browsing through all those options! 


Today, we’ll try and get you to your coding problems faster by comparing two of the most popular platforms for coding interview preparation: Educative and LeetCode. In doing so, we'll answer the question: **Which platform is best for your long-term career growth?**


**We’ll cover**:
* Educative vs LeetCode: Coding interviews
* Educative vs LeetCode: Beyond the coding interview
* Wrapping up and next steps

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## Educative vs LeetCode: 
For technical interview preparation, you can spend hours practicing coding problems on both Educative an LeetCode. This type of hands-on practice is great for sharpening your coding skills and your ability to leverage data structures and algorithms for problem-solving.

Both Educative and LeetCode offer:
* Coding problems for popular programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, and Java
* Real-world interview questions from tech companies (including FAANG companies such as Microsoft and Amazon)
* Playgrounds and coding environments in which you can develop and test projects
* Assessments 
* Coding problems to help practice techniques such as recursion and dynamic programming

Despite some of their similarities, **Educative and LeetCode are very different types of platforms**. 

LeetCode is limited to tech interview preparation. Educative, on the other hand, is a **fully-fledged learning platform** that offers interview preparation courses among a vast library of courses and learning paths on several programming topics.  

When you're stuck on a problem in LeetCode, you may be able to see others’ solutions for inspiration. But on Educative, you can reference course content with which you can gain a comprehensive understanding to **overcome more than a single coding problem**. 

Each platform offers their unique features, some of which include: 

**LeetCode**
* Community answers to see others’ solutions
* Social media sharing options after solving a problem 

**Educative**
* Interactive courses and learning paths with completion certificates
* *Educative Projects* to develop projects for your portfolios on GitHub or LinkedIn

You can certainly get coding interview practice on both platforms. However, you'll find that **Educative has an indisputable edge** once we consider long-term learning and career opportunities. 

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## Educative vs LeetCode: Beyond the coding interview 
 
As you grow in your career, you'll outgrow the need to study for coding interviews, and you’ll hit a ceiling with LeetCode. When it comes to supporting your long-term career growth, Educative shines.

### Learning the fundamentals
I know of someone who landed their first developer job as a self-taught developer. This is usually something to celebrate, but the plot twist is that they didn't learn software engineering fundamentals at all. They simply practiced countless LeetCode problems until they lucked out and passed a coding assessment. While they did start a new job, they soon found themselves completely unprepared for their job responsibilities. (Spoiler: things didn't go well for them). 

You may already know this, but this story is a drastic example of how **LeetCode can't replace an education on programming fundamentals**. 

In contrast with LeetCode, Educative's in-depth course content helps you **learn the fundamentals** that are essential to mastering any new coding skill. While LeetCode offers some content covering programming fundamentals in *LeetCode Explore*, this content is far more sparse and high-level than the variety of topics and **depth of knowledge** in Educative's interactive courses and learning paths.

### Long-term growth
As you advance toward senior software engineering roles, you'll need to master more than just coding skills. You'll need advanced technical skills such as **system design**. You'll also need soft skills if you advance into a leadership role. Unlike LeetCode, Educative offers in-depth system design courses as well as courses to help you gain those **career-defining soft skills**.

Some of Educative's interview preparation courses for **advanced software engineering roles** include:
* [Grokking the System Design Interview](https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview?eid=5082902844932096)
* [Grokking the Behavioral Interview](https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-behavioral-interview?eid=5082902844932096)

As you become an experienced developer, you may decide to learn **new skills and specializations**. At this stage, Educative is better equipped to support your growth. For instance, let's say you wanted to start working with SQL. LeetCode does offer some SQL problems that you can solve to get some experience. However, it'd be a better investment of your time to start building a solid understanding of the fundamentals of SQL through an in-depth Educative learning path (e.g. *[Become a Database Professional](https://www.educative.io/path/become-database-professional?eid=5082902844932096)*). 

**Your coding career can take you many places**. Whether you want to become a front-end developer, data analyst, quantum computer scientist, or machine learning professional, Educative can help you in whichever direction you choose to take. 

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## Wrapping up and next steps
LeetCode can help you prepare for coding interviews. However, Educative goes **beyond coding interview prep** to provide **software engineering education** for your long-term growth. Mastering coding interviews is just the first step in the game, and Educative can help you advance far past that milestone to pick up entirely new languages or techniques.

Keeping your **long-term success** in mind, take the step to ace your next coding interview and check out  [**Interview Prep with Educative**](https://learn.educative.io/interview-prep?eid=5082902844932096). You'll find all our interview preparation courses here in one place, whether you're preparing for coding interviews, system design interviews, or more. We're excited to see you join the 800,000 developers who have leveled up with us.

*Happy learning!*

### Continue learning about interview preparation on Educative

* [LeetCode vs. Educative: Engaging your long-term memory](https://www.educative.io/blog/leetcode-vs-educative?eid=5082902844932096)
* [Master Algorithms with Python for Coding Interviews](https://www.educative.io/blog/python-algorithms-coding-interview?eid=5082902844932096)
* [Cracking the top Amazon coding interview questions](https://www.educative.io/blog/crack-amazon-coding-interview-questions?eid=5082902844932096)

### Start a discussion 
What service or website do you use to prepare for an interview? Was this article helpful? Let us know in the comments below!