The Best FAANG Interview Prep Resources in 2026 (Free + Paid)

There are more coding interview resources in 2026 than there are interview questions. That’s the problem. Most candidates don’t fail because they picked a bad resource — they fail because they bounced between six good ones and finished none.

This is a tiered, opinionated guide: what’s genuinely worth your time, what’s worth your money, and what’s worth skipping. We run a prep site ourselves, so take our self-mention with the grain of salt it deserves — we’ve marked it clearly and we’ll tell you exactly where competitors are better.

Free Tier: You Can Get Hired Without Spending a Dollar

Let’s be clear up front: the free tier is enough to pass FAANG interviews. Paid resources buy convenience and structure, not secret knowledge.

1. LeetCode (free problems)

The de facto standard. Interviewers literally pull questions from it, and its judge, test cases, and discussion threads are unmatched. The free set (~2,500+ problems) is far more than anyone needs.

Weakness: zero curriculum. LeetCode is a gym, not a coach. Grinding “Problems, sorted by acceptance rate” is how people do 400 problems and still fail — you need an outside ordering (see the next three entries).

2. NeetCode 150

The best free problem ordering available. Curated list of 150 problems grouped by pattern, each with a clear video solution. If you already know your data structures and just need interview-specific practice, start here. The videos are genuinely excellent — better than most paid course content.

Weakness: it assumes you already know what a heap is. If you don’t, videos about heap problems teach you to imitate solutions, not derive them.

3. Blind 75

The original minimalist list, still relevant because interview question distribution hasn’t changed much. If your interview is in two weeks, this is your triage list.

4. Tech Interview Handbook

Free, comprehensive, and covers the stuff problem lists ignore: resumes, behavioral rounds, negotiation. Read the negotiation section even if you read nothing else — it has the highest dollar-per-minute value of anything in this post.

5. Algorithms in 60 Days (that’s us — judge accordingly)

Our own 60-day structured curriculum exists to fix the gap the resources above leave open: sequencing for people who need to (re)build fundamentals. One topic per day, from arrays and time complexity through binary search, dynamic programming, and backtracking, with Python implementations throughout. Signing up is free.

Honest positioning: if you’re already comfortable deriving solutions and just want interview reps, NeetCode 150 is the better next step. Use us if you want a day-by-day plan that builds concepts in order instead of assuming them.

6. CS50 / MIT OpenCourseWare (fundamentals)

If terms like “amortized” or “invariant” make you glaze over, a real algorithms course beats any problem list. Harvard’s CS50 and MIT 6.006 are free, rigorous, and slower — which is the point. Most people should not start here unless fundamentals are genuinely missing; it’s a semester-scale commitment.

LeetCode Premium (~$35/month or ~$159/year)

Worth it if you have target companies. The company-tagged question lists (“asked at Google in the last 6 months”) are the single most valuable paid feature in all of interview prep. The debugger and editorial solutions are nice-to-haves.

Skip it if you’re more than 3 months from applying — tags matter most in the final stretch.

AlgoExpert (~$99–139)

Polished, finite (~200 problems), with consistently good video explanations and a tidy UI. The “finite” part is underrated: a bounded course you finish beats an infinite one you abandon.

Honest take: almost everything in it exists free on NeetCode. You’re paying for packaging, the built-in workspace, and psychological completeness. That’s a legitimate thing to pay for — just know what you’re buying.

Grokking-style pattern courses (Design Gurus, ~$50–200)

“Grokking the Coding Interview” popularized pattern-first teaching (sliding window, two pointers, fast & slow pointers…). The pattern taxonomy is genuinely useful mental furniture, and the text-based format suits people who hate video.

Weakness: the practice environments and problem depth trail LeetCode badly. Read it for the taxonomy, practice elsewhere.

interviewing.io / mock interviews (~$100–250 per session)

Anonymous mock interviews with real FAANG engineers, with recordings and written feedback. Expensive per hour — and the highest-ROI paid product on this list for people who fail interviews they “should” pass. Solving problems alone and solving them while explaining your reasoning to a stranger are different sports. If your onsite is worth a $50–100k compensation swing, two mock sessions are cheap.

Budget alternative: Pramp-style free peer mocks (see community tier). Lower-quality feedback, same nerve-training.

The books: CTCI and EPI (~$30–60)

  • Cracking the Coding Interview is showing its age in problem selection, but chapters on process — what interviewers evaluate, how to behave when stuck — remain the best written anywhere.
  • Elements of Programming Interviews (EPI) is the hard-mode option: denser, harder problems, excellent Python edition. Best used by strong candidates targeting the toughest loops, not by beginners.

Neither book is necessary in 2026. Both are still good.

Community Tier: Free, Underrated, Slightly Chaotic

  • Discord servers (NeetCode’s, CS Career Hub, and university-adjacent servers): accountability, study groups, and fast answers to “is my approach right?” questions. The daily-problem channels are a cheap habit-builder.
  • Blind: unmatched for compensation data and company-specific interview intel; also a negativity firehose. Go in with a specific question, get out.
  • Peer mock platforms (Pramp-style): you interview them, they interview you. Free, and being the interviewer teaches you more than you’d expect about what signals matter.
  • r/leetcode and r/cscareerquestions: useful for recent interview experience threads at specific companies; filter the doom-posting.

Community resources don’t replace practice — they solve the quitting problem. Most prep failures are consistency failures, and a study group is the cheapest fix ever invented. (It’s also why our curriculum ships with a forum and progress tracking.)

“My fundamentals are shaky” (2–3 months out, $0): Algorithms in 60 Days for concepts in order → NeetCode 150 for interview reps → Blind 75 as a final-week review. Add Tech Interview Handbook for behavioral rounds.

“I know my DS&A, interview in 4–6 weeks” ($0–35): NeetCode 150 → LeetCode Premium in the final 3 weeks for company tags → 2–3 peer mocks.

“Senior candidate, big-comp loop, money is no object” (~$300–600): LeetCode Premium + EPI for hard problems + two interviewing.io mocks. System-design prep too, but that’s a separate post.

“Interview on Friday” ($0): Blind 75, company tag list if you have Premium, one peer mock, sleep.

The Real Advice

Every resource above has produced FAANG offers. The differentiator is never the resource — it’s finishing one plan instead of sampling five, and practicing explaining solutions, not just producing them.

Pick one primary resource today, put 60–90 minutes on your calendar daily, and start. If you want that plan pre-built with one topic per day, start Day 1 free — and if you’d rather begin by testing your pattern-recognition, our deep dives on binary search beyond sorted arrays and recursion are a good sample of the teaching style.

Good luck out there — and remember: one finished plan beats five started ones.