TL;DR: the Grokking catalog changed more in 2026 than in any year since it began: a course was renamed, two were merged, and a new one launched. This page is the current map. The core system design track is System Design Fundamentals → Grokking the System Design Interview → Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II, with System Design Patterns running underneath as the concept layer, and specialist courses alongside. The table near the end matches each goal to a starting course.
Course catalogs drift out of date in other people's reviews long before they drift out of date at the source. After this year's renames and launches, most third-party "Grokking courses" write-ups now describe a catalog that no longer exists. This is the canonical map as of July 2026, from the person who maintains the catalog, and this page will be kept current as things change.
First: what changed in 2026
Two renames account for most of the confusion this year:
- Grokking System Design Fundamentals is now simply System Design Fundamentals. Same course, same URL, same progress if you were enrolled.
- Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview no longer exists as a separate course: its deep-dive material was expanded and merged into Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II. Old links redirect. The full story of that merge is here.
Also new this year: the System Design Patterns course launched, the flagship grew to 83 lessons with AI study features, and quizzes rolled out across the catalog. The 2026 update rundown covers the flagship's changes in detail.
The map
The system design track
The spine of the catalog: three courses, one per career stage.
System Design Fundamentals is the beginner on-ramp: 100+ short text-based lessons teaching the vocabulary (load balancers, caching, CDNs, sharding, CAP, databases, messaging) with section quizzes and no prerequisites beyond basic programming. Roughly 20 hours. If you can already explain what a load balancer and a CDN do, you can skip it; the self-test guide settles it in 30 seconds.
Grokking the System Design Interview is the flagship and the course the whole family is named after: the 6-step framework, the building blocks at interview depth, the 22-lesson trade-offs module, and 18 classic problems worked end to end, in 83 lessons with video, interactive diagrams, ~400 quizzes, and the AI design playground. Built for engineers with roughly 0-5 years of experience facing real interview loops. The honest review covers what it does well and where it stops.
Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II is the senior bar: 142 lessons and ~36 hours of deep dives into seven real distributed systems (Dynamo, Cassandra, Kafka, Chubby, GFS, HDFS, BigTable), twelve senior-level design problems, and mock-interview walkthroughs, built for Senior, Staff, and L5/L6 loops. What it covers, in full.
The concept layer
System Design Patterns: From Fundamentals to Real Systems sits under the whole track rather than on it: 62 architecture patterns across 10 chapters (including the catalog's only AI infrastructure chapter), a capstone design per chapter, and four full systems at the end. It's the first course in the catalog built for every engineer who works on systems, interviewing or not. The full tour, the free pattern reference, and how it pairs with the flagship are all on this site.
The specialists
Three narrower system design courses for specific situations:
- Grokking Microservices Design Patterns: service-boundary architecture (sagas, CQRS, event sourcing, decomposition, data ownership) for engineers building or interviewing on microservices. How it differs from the other pattern courses is untangled here.
- Grokking Scalable Systems for Interviews: a focused ~15-hour course on scalability questions specifically, for engineers who want that dimension drilled hard.
- System Design Interview Crash Course: the compact, video-leaning option for time-pressured prep, when the full flagship won't fit the calendar.
The other interview tracks
System design is one round of a loop. The catalog covers the others:
- Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions: 245 problems organized by algorithm pattern (sliding window, two pointers, BFS/DFS and the rest), for LeetCode-style coding rounds. The catalog's largest course and its longest-running.
- Grokking the Object Oriented Design Interview: low-level design rounds: classes, relationships, and OOD principles applied to case studies like a parking lot or a booking system, ~20 hours. When you face LLD vs HLD is explained here.
Which course first, by goal
| Your goal | Start with | Then |
|---|---|---|
| First system design interview, 8+ weeks | Grokking the System Design Interview | Fundamentals first only if the self-test says so |
| Interview inside 4 weeks | Grokking the SDI (or the Crash Course if time is truly short) | Mock interviews |
| Senior / Staff / L5-L6 loop | Grokking the SDI + Volume II | Patterns as reference between rounds |
| Durable skill, no deadline | System Design Patterns | Volume II or Microservices Patterns for depth |
| Total beginner to backend | System Design Fundamentals | The flagship or Patterns, per your goal |
| Coding rounds | Grokking the Coding Interview | Runs parallel to any of the above |
| LLD / OOD / machine coding round | Grokking the OOD Interview | Separate prep from HLD |
| Microservices at work | System Design Patterns | Microservices Design Patterns |
On pricing: every course offers lifetime access individually, and the annual subscription unlocks the entire catalog, which is the sensible option for anyone taking more than one course in a year. Regional pricing applies automatically. Most courses have free preview lessons, and the free tier of the flagship includes the AI features.
Frequently asked questions
How many Grokking courses are there? Nine currently: the three-course system design track (Fundamentals, the flagship, Volume II), the System Design Patterns concept course, three specialists (Microservices Patterns, Scalable Systems, the Crash Course), and two other interview tracks (the Coding Interview and the OOD Interview).
What happened to Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview? It was merged into Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II in 2026; its distributed-systems deep dives are all there, and old links redirect. Full details.
Is Grokking System Design Fundamentals gone? No, just renamed: it's now System Design Fundamentals, with identical content and URL.
Do I need more than one course? For a full interview loop, usually two tracks: coding plus system design. Within system design, most engineers need exactly one course at a time; the table above picks it. The subscription exists for people who'll cross multiple over a year.
Which courses are official, given the similar names on other platforms? Everything listed here lives on DesignGurus.io and is built by the original Grokking team. Educative's similarly named "Grokking Modern System Design Interview" is a different product by a different team; that story is here.
Related reading
- What Is Grokking System Design? The history of the methodology and the name.
- Grokking's Pattern Courses, Untangled. The three "patterns" courses disambiguated.
- System Design Fundamentals vs the Flagship: Which First?. The on-ramp decision with a 30-second self-test.
- Grokking the System Design Interview Review. The honest deep review of the flagship.
Start from the table, not the catalog
Nine courses is a catalog, not a to-do list. Find your row in the table above, open that one course's free preview on DesignGurus.io, and ignore the rest until your goal changes.
Browse All Courses on DesignGurus.io · Start with the Flagship, Free