Newcomers to the tech interviewing circuit may be confused between a couple different services: NeetCode and Leetcode. Importantly, both of these services are used to help prepare for programming interviews.

In this post, we’ll cover the difference between the two.

Why do we need NeetCode or Leetcode?

We need these services because they help us prepare for programming interviews. These services have done an excellent job at capturing the essense of a particular type of question asked by tech companies.

What is Leetcode?

Leetcode.com is a website with thousands of coding challenges. On the site, you go through a series of problems that range in difficulty from Easy to Medium to Hard.

On Leetcode, you can sign up for a free account. The free account has a lot of great features and lets you do the core functionality of drilling coding challenges. The following screen grab is an example of what a problem looks like on Leetcode:

Leetcode also has some training sections that teach you data structures, algorithms, and problem solving techniques.

In addition to the free options, Leetcode offers a premium membership option. It gives you access to more questions and interesting features like sorting problems by the frequency they’re asked at a particular company.

Leetcode questions have become one of the most popular types of questions to ask in coding interviews, especially for big tech and FAANG companies.

What is NeetCode?

Remember how I said Leetcode has thousands of problems? For most developers, including myself, that’s way too many problems to practice when preparing for an interview.

Enter NeetCode! NeetCode.io is a website created by a software engineer that aims at providing a curated list of 150 problems from Leetcode to practice. These problems are organized into the following categories:

• Arrays & Hashmaps
• Two Pointers
• Sliding Windows
• Stack
• Binary Seach
• Linked List
• Trees
• Tries
• Heap / Priority Queue
• Backtracking
• Graphs
• Advanced Graphs
• 1-D Dynamic Programming
• 2-D Dynamic Programming
• Greedy
• Intervals
• Math & Geometry
• Bit Manipulation

Not only does he provide a curated list, he also provides written solutions and excellent video tutorials explaining how to solve each problem.

NeetCode has seen so much success helping folks prepare for interviews that he recently created a paid tier for his website that has access to courses and additional content. While I haven’t subscribed to this tier yet, I’m sure it’s worth it given the quality of his free content.

Using NeetCode and Leetcode together

Whenever someone is preparing for a tech interview, I often recommend they use Neetcode as a guide and solve problems directly in LeetCode. This way, you’ll get all the benefits of the curated list and explanations on Neetcode while still getting good hands-on-keyboard practice on LeetCode.

More tips and guidance

I wrote an entire Interview Guide for someware engineering interviews, so please check it out!