Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Exercism VS Codewars

Compare Exercism VS Codewars and see what are their differences

Exercism logo Exercism

Download and solve practice problems in over 30 different languages.

Codewars logo Codewars

Achieve code mastery through challenge.
  • Exercism Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-28
  • Codewars Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12

Exercism features and specs

  • Free Access
    Exercism provides free access to a wide range of coding exercises and learning resources, making it accessible to everyone regardless of their financial situation.
  • Mentorship
    Offers personalized mentorship from experienced developers who can provide feedback and guidance on your code submissions.
  • Wide Variety of Languages
    Supports numerous programming languages, which allows users to learn and practice coding in multiple languages.
  • Structured Learning Tracks
    Organizes exercises into structured tracks, guiding learners through progressively challenging problems in a logical order.
  • Community Support
    Has an active community forum where users can discuss problems, share insights, and ask for help.
  • Open Source Contributions
    Encourages contributions to the platform itself, offering an opportunity for users to give back and improve the resources available to others.
  • Focus on Clean Code
    Emphasizes writing clean, well-documented code, which is beneficial for developing best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Exercism

  • Variable Mentorship Quality
    The quality of mentorship can vary, as it depends on the availability and expertise of volunteer mentors.
  • Learning Curve
    There can be a steep learning curve for beginners who may find some exercises too challenging without sufficient initial guidance.
  • Limited Interactivity
    Exercises are primarily text-based without interactive or visual learning aids, which might be less engaging for some users.
  • Dependence on Volunteers
    The platform relies heavily on volunteer mentors, which can lead to delays in getting feedback and may affect the consistency of support.
  • Interface Complexity
    Some users find the interface and workflow somewhat complex and unintuitive, particularly for those new to the platform.
  • No Real-Time Collaboration
    Lacks real-time collaboration features, meaning users cannot code together or get instant feedback.
  • Focus on Individual Learning
    The platform predominantly focuses on individual learning rather than collaborative projects, which can be a downside for those looking to develop team-working skills.

Codewars features and specs

  • Wide Range of Challenges
    Codewars offers a broad spectrum of coding challenges ranging from easy to very difficult, catering to all skill levels.
  • User Engagement
    The platform encourages community interaction through comments, user-submitted challenges, and solutions, fostering a collaborative learning environment.
  • Multiple Languages
    Codewars supports a variety of programming languages, allowing users to practice and improve skills in their language of choice.
  • Gamification
    The use of a ranking system, badges, and honor points adds a gamified layer to the learning process, making it more engaging and motivating.
  • Detailed Solutions
    After solving a challenge, users can view multiple solutions from others, offering a range of approaches and insights into problem-solving.

Possible disadvantages of Codewars

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Beginners might find some challenges too difficult at first, which can be discouraging without proper guidance or learning resources.
  • Quality Variability
    The quality of user-submitted challenges can be inconsistent, meaning not all katas are equally useful or well-designed.
  • Limited In-Depth Learning
    While great for practice, Codewars does not provide comprehensive tutorials or in-depth explanations, which are often needed for mastering complex concepts.
  • Time Consumption
    The addictive nature of the platform can lead to spending excessive time on solving challenges, potentially detracting from other learning activities.

Exercism videos

Learn with Exercism.io

More videos:

  • Review - JavaScript Exercise | Learn JavaScript with Exercism | #0 Setup
  • Review - exercism.io 01 hello-world

Codewars videos

Codewars Review & Tips

More videos:

  • Review - Practising Programming | Codewars Intro

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Exercism and Codewars)
Online Learning
55 55%
45% 45
Online Education
53 53%
47% 47
Online Courses
51 51%
49% 49
Education
59 59%
41% 41

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Exercism and Codewars

Exercism Reviews

LeetCode Alternatives: Top platforms for coding practice
What are LeetCode and LeetCode alternatives good for?LeetCode💡Interested in leveling up your career? Apply to the Formation Fellowship today!ApplyHackerRankCodeSignalAlgoExpertCodewarsGeeksforGeeksEdabitExercismTopCoderShould you use LeetCode for advanced interview prep?Get holistic interview prep with Formation
Source: formation.dev
8 Best LeetCode Alternatives and Similar Platforms
Exercism is the alternative to LeetCode learning platform, with over 4000 activities in up to 52 popular programming languages. It is very different from other comparable programming websites in that it emphasizes solo practice and also mentor-based learning. The greatest part about this software is to have an active developer community that assists novices all around the...
The 10 Most Popular Coding Challenge Websites [Updated for 2021]
Exercism is a coding challenge website that offers 3100+ challenges spanning 52 different programming languages. After picking a language that you'd like to master, you tackle the coding challenges right on your machine (Exercism has their own command line interface that you can download from GitHub).
Top 25 websites for coding challenge and competition [Updated for 2021]
Best qualities: Exercism starts off with language tracks that allow users to choose their preferred languages. Moreover, there are human mentors who will check your code and help you improve as you progress. This makes the platform perfect for total beginners who want to deepen their understanding of a new programming language.

Codewars Reviews

LeetCode Alternatives: Top platforms for coding practice
Edabit offers a learning experience similar to learning a new language, focusing on smaller and more frequent exercises that build proficiency over time. Like Codewars, Edabit provides many challenges that increase in difficulty as you progress. It's designed to transition smoothly from easy to more challenging problems.
Source: formation.dev
Discover the Top Leetcode Alternatives
In conclusion, while Leetcode remains a valuable resource for coders, the platforms listed above offer varied approaches to learning and improving coding skills. Whether you're drawn to the gamified learning environment of CodenQuest or the community-driven challenges of Codewars and Exercism, there's a Leetcode alternative that suits your learning style and objectives....
Source: codenquest.com
15 Best LeetCode Alternatives 2023
This LeetCode alternative has excellent features for anyone looking to sharpen their coding skills. Codewars uses kata, which are small coding exercises that are community developed to help you master your language of choice. Alternatively, Codewars has over 55+ programming languages that you can learn.
The 10 Most Popular Coding Challenge Websites [Updated for 2021]
Codewars provides a large collection of coding challenges submitted and edited by their own community. You can solve the challenges directly online in their editor in one of several languages. You can view a discussion for each challenges as well as user solutions.
Top 10 Online Challenge Websites in Python
You will see a modular progression when you start the tutorial on Python. Codewars makes solving these challenges that much more fun. It feeds the competition with the score and ranking system. They present challenges created by qualified questions in different languages.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Exercism should be more popular than Codewars. It has been mentiond 313 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Exercism mentions (313)

  • Build Code-RAGent, an agent for your codebase
    The only thing left to do then was to build something that could showcase the power of code ingestion within a vector database, and it immediately clicked in my mind: "Why don't I ingest my entire codebase of solved Go exercises from Exercism?" That's how I created Code-RAGent, your friendly coding assistant based on your personal codebases and grounded in web search. It is built on top of GPT-4.1, powered by... - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • I Finished The Odin Project's Foundation Track
    This is where sources like freeCodeCamp or Scrimba absolutely shine. With Odin, you read an article and may follow along with examples. But it’s unlikely you develop the muscle memory to implement the concepts on your own. Odin does offer some in-house exercises and often assigns external ones too. Still, I believe it’s not enough. You don’t lift weight only 5 times and say I’ve got this! You keep lifting until... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Exercism 48in24 Recap
    If I get the time I would very much like to share my notes on adopting the various languages and perhaps even my solutions to some of the exercises. I have some reservations to doing the latter, since it does spoil the fun of solving the exercises for you. I have made some basic tooling which could be of interest/inspiration to you if you are in on Exercism. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: Platform for senior devs to learn other programming languages?
    I think you are looking for Exercism: https://exercism.org/ Great website! - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Top FP technologies
    Appeared at 2012. Built on top of BEAM to make Erlang\OTP runtime more accessible, because Erlang is not user friendly really; and shares the same abstractions and OTP framework for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. Though initially designed with dynamic typing, Elixir is actively developing static typing capabilities cnrs. As Joe Armstrong said about types "no good type system save you from node... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

Codewars mentions (160)

  • Of recursion and backtracking
    Recently, I was working on a coding kata on codewars.com. Early on, I started thinking that a potential solution might utilize recursion, a concept that involves a function calling itself. However, I quickly realized that my grasp of recursion was not as solid as it needed to be for this task. In this post, I will share the insights gained from deepening my understanding of recursion while working through the kata. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • 4th year, about to fail an entire semester's worth of classes.
    Get more involved. Look into internships and junior SWE positions to get a sample of what you'd be applying for once you graduate. Solve coding challenges, start working on a portfolio of your personal works. I recommend codewars.com for coding challenges, it's fun. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Beginner with C++ looking for direction
    I'd recommend to play around with some basic coding challenges on leetcode.com or codewars.com. If the course prepared you well you won't find this useful, but playing around with them will make sure that you are comfortable with basics such as loops, if statements etc. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Can you guys recommend an efficient way to learn in advance IT para sa mga walang alam?
    I would advise for you to start with Python, it's a beginner-friendly programming language and it'll help with wrapping your mind around things. Play around with it, perhaps do some katas on CodeWars and you'll be set. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How do I develop programming logic?
    There is a website called codewars.com where you can select problems of varying difficulty for the language you need. It is very helpful for learning. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Exercism and Codewars, you can also consider the following products

Codecademy - Learn the technical skills you need for the job you want. As leaders in online education and learning to code, we’ve taught over 45 million people using a tested curriculum and an interactive learning environment.

Free Code Camp - Learn to code by helping nonprofits.

LeetCode - Practice and level up your development skills and prepare for technical interviews.

Treehouse - Treehouse is an award-winning online platform that teaches people how to code.

Pluralsight - Pluralsight is a learning management system (LMS) that helps aspiring tech professionals learn the basics of the trade and lets established professionals expand their skill sets.

edX - Best Courses. Top Institutions. Learn anytime, anywhere.