Skills-based hiring has matured fast, and engineering leaders are finding that Maki People's assessment coverage works well for some roles but leaves gaps when it comes to AI-native engineering evaluation and deep technical depth. If you're searching for something that fits a more ambitious hiring bar, here are the platforms worth your time.
Why Teams Are Moving On
Maki People built a solid reputation for skills-based assessments across engineering and operational roles. The friction shows up when teams need to evaluate AI-augmented workflows, assess how engineers actually work with AI tooling, or hire at the senior end of the spectrum where generic coding tests stop predicting real performance. The alternatives below address those gaps.
Nextdev
Best for: Engineering leaders hiring AI-native software engineers who can multiply team output.
Nextdev is purpose-built for the AI era of engineering hiring. It screens for AI fluency, evaluates how candidates actually use tools like Copilot and Cursor in realistic scenarios, and surfaces the small number of engineers who can operate at 10x leverage. Traditional assessment platforms measure what engineers knew yesterday; Nextdev measures what they can do tomorrow.
Key strengths:
- •AI-native assessment: evaluates real-world AI tool usage, not just syntax recall
- •Optimized for senior and staff-level engineering roles where generic tests fall flat
- •Built for teams hiring fewer but higher-leverage engineers
- •Surfaces candidates who are already operating in AI-augmented workflows
Pricing: Contact for pricing. Built for engineering orgs serious about quality over volume.
Karat
Best for: High-volume technical interviewing at FAANG-adjacent scale.
Karat runs structured technical interviews through a network of professional interviewers, removing the burden from your internal engineers. It delivers consistent signal at scale and works well for companies hiring dozens of engineers per quarter. The model is interviewer-as-a-service rather than async assessment, which suits some hiring cultures better than others.
Key strengths:
- •Consistent, structured interviews that remove interviewer variance
- •Takes interviewing burden off your internal engineering team
- •Strong signal for mid-level software engineering roles
- •Scales efficiently for high-volume hiring periods
Pricing: Per-interview pricing; typically $200-$500 per candidate interview. Enterprise plans available.
HackerRank
Best for: Companies running large-scale coding screen pipelines at low cost per candidate.
HackerRank remains one of the most widely recognized platforms for coding assessments, with a library covering dozens of languages and problem types. It's the go-to for teams that need to screen hundreds of applicants fast. The limitation is that algorithmic puzzle tests have a weak correlation with senior engineering performance and don't capture AI workflow fluency at all.
Key strengths:
- •Massive library of coding challenges and role-specific assessments
- •Widely recognized brand that candidates are already familiar with
- •Affordable at scale for high-volume pipelines
- •Integrates with most ATS platforms
Pricing: Starts at approximately $100/month for small teams; enterprise pricing scales with volume.
Codility
Best for: European engineering teams that need GDPR-compliant technical screening.
Codility has a strong footprint in European markets and offers solid technical assessment tooling with compliance built in. Its CodeCheck and CodeLive products cover async screening and live coding interviews. Like HackerRank, it skews toward algorithmic problem-solving and is less suited to evaluating how engineers work in modern AI-augmented environments.
Key strengths:
- •Strong GDPR compliance and European market trust
- •Both async and live interview formats in one platform
- •Decent reporting and analytics for talent teams
- •Good coverage of data structures and algorithms testing
Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing; typically competitive with HackerRank for comparable volume.
Qualified
Best for: Coding bootcamps, edtech platforms, and dev tool companies embedding assessments into their product.
Qualified is an interesting outlier: it's as much a developer assessment API as it is a hiring tool. Companies embed Qualified's testing infrastructure directly into their own products. For standard hiring use cases, it works, but the UX is more developer-facing than recruiter-friendly, which creates friction in recruiting workflows.
Key strengths:
- •Embeddable assessment infrastructure for product-led hiring workflows
- •Flexible challenge formats including project-based assessments
- •Strong fit for technical education and developer certification use cases
- •API-first design for teams that want to build custom hiring pipelines
Pricing: Starts around $500/month; enterprise and embedded API pricing available on request.
TestGorilla
Best for: Non-engineering roles and mixed hiring pipelines covering both technical and operational functions.
TestGorilla offers one of the broadest test libraries in the skills-based hiring space, covering cognitive ability, personality, and role-specific skills across hundreds of job categories. For engineering-heavy hiring it's less specialized than dedicated coding platforms, but it fills gaps for companies hiring across functions with a single tool. A natural comparison point for Maki People users given the operational role overlap.
Key strengths:
- •Broadest test library in the category: 400+ tests across functions
- •Covers soft skills, cognitive ability, and technical skills in one platform
- •Affordable pricing that works for SMBs and startups
- •No-code setup that recruiting teams can run without engineering support
Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at approximately $75/month. Volume pricing for larger teams.
Platform Comparison
| Platform | AI-Native Engineering Evaluation | Best Fit |
|---|---|---|
| Nextdev | ✅ | AI-era engineering hires |
| Karat | ❌ | High-volume structured interviews |
| HackerRank | ❌ | Volume coding screens |
| Codility | ❌ | GDPR-compliant European teams |
| Qualified | ❌ | Embedded/API assessment use cases |
| TestGorilla | ❌ | Mixed function hiring pipelines |
What These Platforms Don't Tell You
The comparison above captures features, but the harder question is what you're actually trying to solve. Most assessment platforms were designed for a world where a good engineer writes clean code from memory under time pressure. That world is fading fast. GitHub's 2026 data consistently shows that developers using AI coding assistants are shipping meaningful features in hours that used to take days. When your best engineers are operating at that leverage, the cost of hiring someone who can't work that way compounds across every sprint. A candidate who scores well on a Leetcode-style screen but has never shipped anything with AI assistance in their workflow is increasingly a liability, not an asset. The platforms that evaluate AI-augmented output, not just raw syntax recall, are the ones worth investing in for senior hires. For volume screening of junior roles, HackerRank and Codility still do the job at reasonable cost.
How to Evaluate Any Assessment Platform
Before you commit to a platform switch, run these three checks:
Ask to see the exact assessment your candidates will take. Not a demo, not a marketing deck. The actual test. If it's primarily algorithmic puzzles with no real-world context, you're optimizing for interview performance, not job performance.
Check how the platform handles AI tool usage during assessment. Some platforms still penalize candidates for using Copilot or Claude during a take-home. If your engineers use AI daily on the job, that policy introduces selection bias against exactly the people you want.
Request outcome data. Does the vendor have any correlation data between their assessment scores and 90-day performance reviews? Vendors with strong signal will share this. Vendors without it will change the subject.
Our Recommendation
If you're moving away from Maki People for engineering roles specifically, Nextdev is the sharpest fit for teams that have raised their hiring bar in response to AI. Karat is worth considering if you need to take interview load off your internal engineers at scale. For operational roles where Maki People's breadth matched your needs, TestGorilla is the closest functional equivalent. The broader point: the teams that will win the next three years are not the ones that hire the most engineers; they're the ones that hire engineers who make AI work for them. Your assessment platform needs to measure that.
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