Compare your options

Compare Your Tech Interview Options

There are five common ways to run technical interviews. This page compares them side by side, with where each one works well and where it falls short, so you can choose without a sales call.

See the Comparison ➔Calculate Your In-House Hours ➔

At a glance

The five options side by side

The same questions, answered for each option.

Interviewing in-house, freelance interviewers, AI interview tools, coding platforms and AssessDev compared
Question	Interviewing in-house	Freelance interviewers	AI interview tools	Coding platforms	AssessDev
Who runs the interview	Your own engineers and hiring managers.	A freelance engineer from your network or from a marketplace such as Upwork.	Software. An AI interviewer asks the questions and scores the answers.	Software sets and scores the test. Your engineers run any live round.	A current or former CTO or senior engineer.
What it tests	Whatever your team agrees on. Each interviewer often asks different questions.	Whatever the freelancer chooses to ask, unless you give them a brief.	Answers to set questions, spoken or typed.	Mostly predefined coding tasks and skills tests that candidates usually take alone.	Technical depth, judgement and a live challenge, with the same questions for every candidate in a role.
Structure and scorecard	You build and maintain them yourself.	Rarely included. You usually provide them.	Built into the tool.	Built into the test.	Built for your role before the first interview.
A live conversation with a person	Yes	Yes	No	Only in the live rounds your team runs.	Yes
Needs a Human-in-the-loop?	Yes. Your own engineers are the humans in the loop.	Yes. The freelancer is the human in the loop.	Yes. Someone in your team has to check the AI's scores. The EU AI Act requires human oversight of high-risk AI systems (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 14).	Yes. Your engineers review the results and run the live rounds.	Already included. A senior engineer runs every interview and you make the hiring decision.
Engineer time on your side	High. One open role takes about 21 hours of interviews with our calculator's default settings.	Low once the freelancer is briefed. Someone still has to brief them and check their work.	Low	Medium. Your engineers review results and run the final rounds.	Low. A 30-minute kick-off call for each role.
What you get after each interview	Interviewer notes, if they are written up.	Whatever the freelancer writes. The format changes from person to person.	An automatic score and a summary.	An automatic score and often a replay of the code.	A PDF report with a grade for each question, a hire or don't-hire recommendation and candidate feedback that is ready to send, within 24 hours.
Cost	Your engineers' time. Work it out with our Total Hiring Needs Calculator.	The hourly rate each freelancer sets.	A software subscription.	A software subscription.	From €78 to €162 per interview. See pricing.
Works best for	Teams that hire a few engineers a year and have trained interviewers with time to spare.	One or two interviews for a niche skill, with someone you already trust.	Very high volumes of applicants for entry-level roles.	Filtering a large pool of applicants on basic coding skills.	Teams whose engineers don't have time to interview, several open roles at once or a CTO hire.

Scroll the table sideways to see every option.

In detail

When each option works, and where it falls short

Interviewing in-house

Your own engineers and hiring managers run every technical interview. This is what most companies do, and for many it works.

Works well when

You hire only a few engineers a year.
Your interviewers are trained and use a shared scorecard.
The people who will work with the candidate want to meet them anyway.

Falls short when

Every hour spent interviewing is an hour your engineers don't spend building.
Interviewers ask different questions, so candidates are hard to compare.
Candidates wait for a free slot in a busy engineer's calendar.

With the default settings of our Total Hiring Needs Calculator, ten open roles take 120 engineer hours in technical interviews alone. Put in your own numbers to see what interviewing costs you.

Freelance interviewers

A freelance engineer from your network, or one you hire on a marketplace such as Upwork, runs the interviews for an hourly fee.

Works well when

You need one or two interviews for a skill nobody in your team has.
You already know and trust the person.
Your structure and scorecard are ready to hand over.

Falls short when

A good engineer is not always a good interviewer, and it is hard to check before the interview.
One person's free time limits how many candidates you can see.
Reports look different from one freelancer to the next.

AI interview tools

An AI interviewer or a one-way video interview asks the questions and scores the answers. There is no person on the other side.

Works well when

You screen thousands of applicants for entry-level roles.
Candidates need to answer at any time of day.
You want the same questions asked in the same way every time.

Falls short when

A randomised field experiment with more than 3,000 applicants found that a one-way recorded interview cut the applicant pool by 53%. The stronger candidates were the ones who left (Avery, Ip, Leibbrandt and Vecci, 2026).
The EU AI Act lists AI systems that evaluate candidates as high-risk, with extra duties for the companies that use them (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Annex III).
Candidates can't ask a clarifying question.

Coding platforms

A coding platform sends candidates a timed coding test or skills test and scores it automatically. Most also offer a shared code editor for live interviews, which your own engineers run.

Works well when

You need to filter a large pool on basic coding skills.
You want every candidate to get the same task.
Your engineers have time to run the live rounds.

Falls short when

A test score shows whether the task was solved. It shows less about how the candidate thinks and works with others.
Your engineers still review results and run the live interviews.
Long unpaid tests ask a lot of candidates' free time.

We compare nine coding test formats in Coding Tests, Ranked by What Psychology Says.

AssessDev

A current or former CTO or senior engineer runs a structured technical interview with each candidate. Every interview has three parts. These are an introduction, about 30 minutes of questions and a live challenge without AI tools.

Works well when

Your engineers don't have time to interview.
You hire for several roles at once, or the interview stage is your bottleneck.
You are hiring a CTO and nobody inside can judge the candidates.

Falls short when

You hire only a few engineers each year. Then training your own interviewers is usually the better choice.
Your hardest problem is finding candidates. We interview candidates and don't source them. We work with an extended network of recruiters who can help, though.
You mainly want to see how a candidate works with your current team.

See the sample interview structure and the pricing.

Named tools

Popular AI interview tools and coding platforms

These are five well-known AI interview tools and coding platforms. Each one is software your own team uses. None of them sends a person to run your interviews.

TestGorilla, HackerRank, Codility, CodeSignal and HireVue compared
Tool	Type	What it offers
TestGorilla	Skills tests and AI interviews	A library of skills tests, simulations and AI interviews that automate screening interviews.
HackerRank	Coding platform and AI interviewer	Screen for coding assessments, Interview for pair programming in a shared editor, and Chakra, an AI interviewer.
Codility	Coding platform	Screen for coding tasks candidates do in their own time, and Interview for structured technical interviews in VS Code.
CodeSignal	Coding platform and AI interviewer	Skills assessments, an AI Interviewer, AI Phone Screens and Live Tech Interviews in a shared workspace.
HireVue	AI interviewer and video interviews	An AI Interviewer, video interviewing, skills and game-based assessments, and a co-pilot that takes notes in live interviews.

Product names and features are taken from each company's own website in October 2026. Check their websites for current plans and prices.

FAQ

Questions buyers ask when they compare

Is AssessDev an AI interview tool?

No. A person runs every AssessDev interview. A current or former CTO or senior engineer asks the questions and watches the live challenge. We don't use AI to screen or evaluate candidates.

Can I use a coding platform and AssessDev together?

Yes. A coding test can filter a large pool of applicants. We then interview the shortlist in a live, structured interview. Your engineers only meet the finalists.

How much does interviewing in-house cost?

It depends on how many roles you hire for and how many candidates you see. With the default settings of our Total Hiring Needs Calculator, one open role takes about 21 hours of interviews. Put in your own numbers to see your cost.

What does AssessDev cost?

Between €78 and €162 per interview, depending on the plan. Monthly plans start at €810 for 5 interviews. Prices exclude VAT. See all plans.

Why not hire a freelance interviewer from Upwork?

You can, and for a single niche interview it can work well. You will need to check how good they are at interviewing, give them a structure and a scorecard, and accept that reports differ between freelancers. We bring the structure, the scorecard and the same report format for every candidate.

Who's behind AssessDev

Interviews Run by People Who Have Hired as CTOs

Meet your direct contacts for every step, from the first call and the job description to the final report and your hiring decision. We guide you through the whole process and treat your candidates as colleagues.

Meet the team ➔

Ready to compare prices?

Every AssessDev plan and price is on our pricing page, and you can pay online without a call.

See Plans and Prices ➔Book a 15-min Call

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