TL;DR: They are two different courses by two different teams. Grokking the System Design Interview on DesignGurus.io is the original course, created by me and my team, and it is the version we still maintain and update. Grokking Modern System Design Interview on Educative is a separately authored course that Educative built after we moved our courses off their platform. Neither is a "version" of the other. If you came here searching for the official one: it lives on DesignGurus.io.
If you search for "grokking system design," you will find two courses with nearly identical names on two different platforms, each presented as the definitive resource. Reddit threads argue about it. Blind posts contradict each other. And the search results do not help, because both platforms rank for the same phrases.
I created the original course, so I am not a neutral party. But this question has a factual answer, not an opinion-based one, and I will also be honest about what Educative's course does well. By the end of this post you will know exactly how the two courses relate, what each one contains, and which one fits your preparation.
Why two courses share one name
Here is the timeline.
2015: the original launches. My team and I created Grokking the System Design Interview when there were essentially no structured resources for system design interviews. At the time, we published it on Educative, a third-party course platform, the way an author publishes a book through a bookstore. The course was text-based, because that is what the platform supported.
2023: we move to our own platform. We took our courses off Educative and made DesignGurus.io their permanent home. Everything we have built since, including video lessons, interactive diagrams, the dedicated trade-offs chapter, and the 2026 curriculum refresh, exists only there.
After the split: Educative builds its own course. Educative kept the "Grokking" naming and published Grokking Modern System Design Interview, authored by Educative's own team. It is not the course we wrote. It is not an updated edition of the course we wrote. It is a new course, written by different people, that inherited a similar name.
That naming overlap is the entire source of the confusion, and it is why this site exists. The homepage covers the short version of this story; this post is the detailed one.
The two courses side by side
| Grokking the System Design Interview (DesignGurus.io) | Grokking Modern System Design Interview (Educative) | |
|---|---|---|
| Authors | Arslan Ahmad and the original Design Gurus team, ex-hiring managers from Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon | Educative's in-house team, led by Educative's founder |
| Relationship to the 2015 original | The same course, continuously updated by its creators | A separately written course with a similar name |
| Structure | 5 chapters, 83 lessons, roughly 20 to 25 hours | 48 modules, 204 lessons, roughly 26 hours |
| Signature content | A dedicated 22-lesson trade-offs chapter; 15+ end-to-end case studies (URL shortener, Instagram, Uber, Messenger) | The RESHADED framework; mock interview modules and quizzes |
| Format | Text, video lessons, and interactive diagrams, with a built-in AI assistant | Interactive text lessons with AI mock interviews |
| Pricing model | Buy once for lifetime access, or an all-course subscription | Platform subscription |
| Used by | 140,000+ engineers across a decade of interview cycles | Not disclosed at time of writing |
Both are real, substantial courses. The point of this table is not that one is illegitimate. The point is that they are different products, so reviews, recommendations, and complaints about one do not automatically apply to the other. When a Reddit comment from 2019 praises "Grokking," it is describing our curriculum, because Educative's separately authored course did not exist yet.
What the original covers today
Since most of the outdated commentary describes the 2015 text-only edition, here is what the course actually looks like in 2026:
- Fundamentals glossary. Twenty lessons covering the building blocks: load balancing, caching, sharding, replication, consistency models, CAP and PACELC, consistent hashing, and the rest of the vocabulary interviews assume.
- A dedicated trade-offs chapter. Twenty-two head-to-head comparisons (strong vs. eventual consistency, SQL vs. NoSQL, batch vs. stream, token bucket vs. leaky bucket). In the hundreds of interviews I conducted at Meta and Microsoft, the ability to articulate trade-offs was the single clearest signal separating hires from rejections, so we made it a full chapter rather than a footnote.
- Case studies. Fifteen-plus end-to-end problems following one repeatable framework, from URL shortener through Instagram, Dropbox, Messenger, Twitter, YouTube, and Uber.
- 2026 updates. AI-era infrastructure questions (LLM serving, RAG pipelines, where GPU scheduling fits in a diagram), video lessons, and interactive diagrams.
For a deeper look at whether it fits your situation, I wrote an honest review of the full course and a breakdown of whether it is worth it in 2026.
What Educative's course offers
To be fair to the other side of this comparison: Grokking Modern System Design Interview is a large course, and Educative has invested in it. It is organized around the RESHADED framework, includes mock interview modules and over a hundred quizzes, and comes with AI-driven practice features. If you already pay for an Educative subscription for other topics and you prefer a quiz-heavy, fill-in-the-blanks style of studying, it can serve you fine.
What it is not, and this is the only claim this post insists on, is the original Grokking course or a continuation of it. The methodology, the pattern-based approach, and the curriculum that built the "Grokking" reputation between 2015 and 2023 were ours, and their maintained form lives on DesignGurus.io.
Which one should you take?
Take the original on DesignGurus.io if:
- You want the course the recommendations were actually about. A decade of "just do Grokking" advice refers to this curriculum.
- You are preparing for the interview conversation, not just absorbing facts. The trade-offs chapter exists specifically to train the articulation interviewers score.
- You want lifetime access instead of a subscription clock ticking while you prepare.
- You want the 2026 material: AI infrastructure questions, video, and interactive diagrams from the team that keeps the course current.
Educative's course may fit if:
- You already have an Educative subscription and want to stay in one ecosystem.
- You prefer heavily quizzed, self-graded practice over case-study-driven learning.
If you are still deciding between prep resources more broadly, I have written the same style of honest comparison against Hello Interview, Alex Xu's books, and Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Frequently asked questions
Is Grokking Modern System Design Interview the official Grokking course? No. It is Educative's separately authored course. The official Grokking the System Design Interview, from the original creators, is on DesignGurus.io.
Is the Educative version the same as the DesignGurus version? No. They share a similar name for historical reasons, but they have different authors, different curricula, and different frameworks. Reviews of one do not describe the other.
Why does Educative have a course called Grokking Modern System Design Interview? The original course was hosted on Educative's platform from 2015 until we moved to DesignGurus.io in 2023. Educative then published its own course under the similar "Grokking Modern" name.
Is there a free version of either course? The original course on DesignGurus.io has free introductory lessons, and we maintain a free open companion on GitHub: design-gurus/grokking-system-design. Educative offers trial access through its subscription.
Which course do the old Reddit and Blind recommendations refer to? Any recommendation that predates 2023 refers to our curriculum, which now lives on DesignGurus.io. Educative's separately authored course did not exist then.
Ready to start? The original course, fully updated for 2026, is here: Grokking the System Design Interview on DesignGurus.io. Prefer to sample first? Start with the free GitHub companion or the free intro lessons.