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. Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers 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 looking 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. 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 rather than an opinion-based one, and I will also be straight about what Educative's course does well. By the end you will know how the two relate, what each one contains, and which one fits your preparation.
Why two courses share one name
Here is the timeline.
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.
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 current curriculum refresh, exists only there.
Educative builds its own course. Educative kept the "Grokking" naming and published Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers, authored by Educative's own team and led by co-founder Fahim ul Haq. 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 the story. This post is the detailed one.
What does "for Engineers & Managers" mean?
This phrase in Educative's course title confuses people, so to be clear: it is a positioning label, not a separate edition. There is no engineers-only version and no managers-only version. The full title is Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers, and it signals that the course targets both individual contributors and engineering managers preparing for system design rounds.
If you have seen the shorter name "Grokking Modern System Design Interview" elsewhere, it is the same course.
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 co-founder Fahim ul Haq |
| Relationship to the original | The same course, continuously updated by its creators | A separately written course with a similar name |
| Lessons | 83 across 5 chapters | 204 |
| Quizzes | 237 | 140 |
| Study time | About 20 hours | About 26 hours |
| Mock interviews | Not included | 8 AI mock interviews |
| Signature content | A 23-lesson trade-offs chapter and 15 end-to-end design problems | The RESHADED framework |
| Format | Text, video lessons, interactive diagrams, AI design feedback | Interactive in-browser text lessons with AI mock interviews |
| Pricing model | $148 once, lifetime access | Educative platform subscription |
| Rating | 4.7 from 60,815 ratings | 4.6 |
| Learners | 182,446 on DesignGurus.io, 440,000+ across both platforms | Not disclosed at course level |
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 an old Reddit comment praises "Grokking," it is describing our curriculum, because Educative's separately authored course did not exist yet.
Worth saying honestly: Educative's course has more lessons, 204 against 83. Lesson counts are not a quality measure, because lesson size differs enormously between platforms and ours bundle more per lesson. But if raw content volume is what you are optimizing for, that is the direction it points.
What the original covers today
Most outdated commentary describes the old text-only edition, so here is what the course actually contains now.
- Introduction. Five lessons on what the interview measures, functional versus non-functional requirements, back-of-the-envelope estimation, and what to avoid.
- Glossary of system design basics. 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 you already know.
- System design trade-offs. Twenty-three head-to-head comparisons: strong versus eventual consistency, SQL versus NoSQL, batch versus stream, token bucket versus leaky bucket, and more. In the hundreds of interviews I conducted at Meta and Microsoft, the ability to articulate trade-offs was the clearest signal separating hires from rejections, so we made it a full chapter rather than a footnote.
- System design problems. Fifteen end-to-end problems following one repeatable framework: TinyURL, Pastebin, Instagram, Dropbox, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, YouTube and Netflix, Typeahead Suggestion, API Rate Limiter, Twitter Search, Web Crawler, Facebook Newsfeed, Yelp and Nearby Friends, Uber, and Ticketmaster. Each has its own quiz.
- Appendix. Reference material and additional resources.
Recent updates added AI-era infrastructure questions, video lessons, and interactive diagrams. For a deeper look at whether it fits your situation, I wrote an honest review of the full course.
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 runs 204 lessons and 140 quizzes across roughly 26 hours, organized around the RESHADED framework, which is Educative's own step-by-step acronym for working through a design question. It includes 8 AI-driven mock interviews and covers case studies including YouTube, WhatsApp, Uber, Twitter, Google Maps, and ChatGPT. It holds a 4.6 rating.
The learn-in-browser format is genuinely good. Educative built its platform around interactive, executable text, and if you like studying that way the experience is polished. If you already pay for an Educative subscription for other topics, the marginal cost of taking it is zero.
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 were ours, and their maintained form lives on DesignGurus.io.
Pricing: the practical difference
This is where the two diverge most in day-to-day terms.
Grokking the System Design Interview is $148 once, for lifetime access, including future updates. You own it. If you interview again in three years, the course is still there and will have been updated in the meantime.
Grokking Modern System Design Interview is available only through an Educative subscription. That is better if you want several Educative courses at once and worse if you want one system design course and nothing else, because access ends when the subscription ends.
Neither model is universally better. If you are studying broadly across many topics on Educative, the subscription is efficient. If system design is the thing you need and you want it permanently, a single payment is the cleaner deal.
Which one should you take?
Take the original on DesignGurus.io if:
- You want the course the recommendations were actually about. Years 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 current material from the team that keeps the course updated.
Educative's course may fit if:
- You already have an Educative subscription and want to stay in one ecosystem.
- You prefer heavily quizzed, in-browser interactive practice over case-study-driven learning.
- You want the largest raw lesson count and are comfortable with a subscription.
If you are deciding between prep resources more broadly, I have written the same style of honest comparison against Hello Interview, Alex Xu's books, ByteByteGo, 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.
What does "for Engineers & Managers" mean in the title?
It is a positioning label indicating the course targets both individual contributors and engineering managers. There is no separate engineers-only or managers-only edition, and it is the same course people refer to as simply Grokking Modern System Design Interview.
How many lessons does Grokking Modern System Design Interview have?
204 lessons, 140 quizzes, and 8 AI mock interviews, at roughly 26 hours of study time. The original on DesignGurus.io is 83 lessons, 237 quizzes, and about 20 hours.
Why does Educative have a course called Grokking Modern System Design Interview?
The original course was hosted on Educative's platform before we moved to DesignGurus.io. Educative then published its own course under the similar "Grokking Modern" name.
How much does each one cost?
The original is $148 once for lifetime access. Educative's course requires an Educative subscription, so the cost depends on the plan you choose, and access ends when the subscription ends.
Is there a free version of either course?
The original 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. For the fuller answer, see is there a free version of Grokking the System Design Interview.
Which course do the old Reddit and Blind recommendations refer to?
Any recommendation predating the platform move 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 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.