The tools to host a hackathon fall into nine jobs: the event page and registration, promotion, team formation, communication, collaboration, the live event, submissions, judging and the reveal, and certificates and reporting. You need something for every one of them. You can cover them with one purpose-built platform, with a stack of free and familiar apps, or with a mix of both, and the right answer depends on the size of your event and how often you run it.
Most lists of hackathon tools name a whiteboard, a video app and an ad platform, and stop there. Those are useful, but none of them registers a participant, locks a judge's score or tells you who won. This guide maps 18 tools to the stage they actually serve, says what each one costs and where it runs out, and ends with three complete stacks you can copy. It comes from a team that has hosted hackathons and game jams for more than five years, and it pairs with our step-by-step guide on how to host a hackathon.
The hackathon tool stack at a glance
| Stage | Free or low-cost pick | All-in-one alternative | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Event page and registration | Luma, Tally, Google Forms, Eventbrite | HackathonHost | Custom questions, approval, waitlist, capacity |
| Promotion | Social posts, community channels, paid ads | HackathonHost public event listing | Can you see where sign-ups came from? |
| Team formation | Discord channel, random team generator | HackathonHost teambuilding board and matchmaking | Can a solo participant find a team without staff help? |
| Communication | Discord, Slack, email | HackathonHost email broadcasts, plus your chat | One place for official announcements |
| Collaboration | Miro, FigJam, GitHub | — (participants bring their own) | Free plan limits for large teams |
| Live event and streaming | Zoom, Gather, OBS Studio | HackathonHost live control and projector mode | Can you change the agenda once, everywhere? |
| Submissions | Devpost, itch.io, GitHub, forms | HackathonHost project submissions | Required fields, deadline lock, confirmation |
| Judging and reveal | Google Sheets, Airtable | HackathonHost jury and public scoring | Weights, judge assignment, locked results |
| Certificates and reporting | Canva, mail merge, survey forms | HackathonHost certificates, surveys and analytics | Verifiable certificates, sponsor-ready numbers |
Read the table as a set of handoffs. Every time the tool changes between two rows, a person moves data from one to the other: exports a CSV, pastes links into a sheet, retypes names into a certificate template. With 40 participants that is an evening. With 300 it is a job, and it lands on the organizers in the busiest hours of the event.
All-in-one hackathon platform
1. HackathonHost
Best for: hosts who want the whole event in one place, from registration to certificates, and hosts who run more than one event a year. Price: a flat $99 per event, with no subscription and no per-participant fees. Universities get three free events a year.
HackathonHost is a hackathon and game jam management platform that covers the stages in the table above in one workspace. Participants register through a public link, find teammates on a teambuilding board with smart matchmaking, and submit projects through a form you configure. Judges score against weighted criteria, with public voting available alongside the jury. On the day, live control drives a projector view of the agenda, deadlines and the winner reveal, and live polls and word clouds keep the room involved. Afterward, certificates, feedback surveys and post-event analytics come from the same records.
It runs under your own branding (white-label), handles online, in-person and hybrid events, supports tickets and door check-in, and offers a website embed and an API. Bulk import and export mean you can bring registrations collected elsewhere, and leave with your data. It is self-serve, so there is no sales call before you can start.
Where it runs out: HackathonHost is not a chat app or a code host. Most hosts still run Discord or Slack for conversation and let teams use GitHub for code. For a very small, informal event, a platform can be more than you need.
Other purpose-built platforms exist, each with a different focus; our comparison of the best hackathon platforms sets them side by side, and how to choose a hackathon platform has a checklist for the decision.
Event page and registration tools
2. Luma
Best for: a clean event page and simple registration for meetups and community hackathons. Price: free for free events at the time of writing; fees and paid plans apply to paid tickets and extra features.
Luma is popular in tech communities because an event page takes minutes and looks good. It handles registration questions, approvals and reminders well. What it does not do is know anything about teams, projects or scores, so participant data has to move to another tool as soon as the build starts.
3. Eventbrite
Best for: public events where ticketing and discovery matter. Price: free to list free events; fees apply to paid tickets.
Eventbrite brings an audience of its own and strong ticketing. For a hackathon, registration is only the first checkpoint, and Eventbrite stops there. Use it when selling tickets or reaching a wider public is the main problem.
4. Tally
Best for: flexible sign-up and application forms on a budget. Price: a generous free plan; paid plans add branding and team features.
Tally builds forms that feel like documents, with logic, hidden fields and file uploads. It is a good choice for applications where you review each entry. Like every form tool, it produces rows, not participants: approvals, waitlists and reminders are yours to run.
5. Google Forms
Best for: the simplest possible registration or submission form. Price: free with a Google account.
Everyone knows how to fill one in, and responses land in a spreadsheet you already know how to use. It has no approval step, no capacity limit and no confirmation beyond an optional receipt email, so it suits small internal events best.
Promotion
6. Paid social ads (Meta and LinkedIn)
Best for: reaching a specific audience outside your existing community. Price: whatever budget you set.
Targeted ads can fill a public event when your own channels are not enough. LinkedIn tends to suit professional and corporate audiences; Meta suits broader and student audiences. Before paying for reach, use the free channels: university clubs and developer communities, sponsor newsletters, past participants, and event listings. Published HackathonHost events appear on the public events page, and your host profile collects them in one place, so every event you run keeps working for the next one.
Team formation
7. HackathonHost free team tools
Best for: a fast, fair split of people into teams at an in-person event, with no sign-up. Price: free.
The random team generator splits a pasted list of names into balanced teams in seconds, and the team name generator ends the naming debate. For events where people choose their own teams, the teambuilding board inside the platform shows open teams and the skills they are missing. Hackathon engagement ideas explains why getting teams formed before kickoff matters so much for retention.
Communication
8. Discord
Best for: developer, student and game jam communities. Price: free.
Discord gives you channels by topic, voice rooms for teams, roles for mentors and judges, and an announcements channel. It is the default community tool for most public hackathons. Its weakness is that fast conversation buries important information, so keep deadlines, rules and submission instructions somewhere more permanent and link to them.
9. Slack
Best for: corporate and internal hackathons where everyone already uses it. Price: free plan with limited message history; paid plans per user.
Slack keeps an internal hackathon inside the tools employees already open every day. For a public event, asking participants to join yet another workspace adds friction, and the free plan's history limit means older messages disappear.
Collaboration and ideation
10. Miro
Best for: brainstorming, user flows and team planning boards. Price: free plan with a limited number of editable boards; paid plans for more.
A shared whiteboard helps teams go from idea to plan in the first hours, especially online. Mentors can also use a board to run short workshops. It is a participant tool, not an organizer tool: it helps teams think, not the host run the event.
11. FigJam
Best for: teams that will design their interface in Figma anyway. Price: free plan available; education plans for students.
FigJam does the same whiteboard job as Miro and sits next to the design files, which saves a handoff for teams building an app or a website.
12. GitHub
Best for: code, version control and project repositories. Price: free for public and private repositories.
Nearly every software hackathon asks for a repository link. Ask teams to create the repository at kickoff, not at the deadline, so commit history shows the work was done during the event. That makes your prior-work rule far easier to check.
Running the live event
13. Zoom
Best for: online kickoffs, mentor office hours, demos and the online reveal. Price: free plan with a time limit on group meetings; paid plans remove it.
Video calls are the stage for an online hackathon. Plan for the limits: breakout rooms for mentor sessions, a recording for people in other time zones, and a paid plan if your kickoff will run longer than the free limit.
14. Gather
Best for: a social, virtual venue where participants can wander between tables. Price: free for small groups; paid for larger events.
Gather recreates the feeling of walking around a venue, which helps with networking and informal mentor drop-ins. It is fun but it is not an operations tool, and it adds one more place people need to find.
15. OBS Studio
Best for: streaming the kickoff and the reveal to YouTube or Twitch. Price: free and open source.
A streamed reveal gives an online hackathon a real finish line and gives sponsors something to share. Pair OBS with a projector view of the results so the stream shows the same screen the room sees.
Submissions and showcase
16. Devpost
Best for: a public gallery of hackathon projects. Price: varies by plan and by whether the hackathon is public or private; check current pricing.
Devpost is the best-known hackathon project gallery, and a public page can bring participants of its own. Review how it handles private judging, weighted rubrics, participant records and exports before you make it the center of your event.
17. itch.io
Best for: game jams and playable builds. Price: free to host a jam.
For game jams, itch.io is where players already are, and browser-playable builds lower the barrier for judges. It is a showcase and ranking site rather than an event management system: team formation, jury assignment and certificates live elsewhere. See choosing a game jam management platform for how the two fit together.
Judging, certificates and reporting
18. Google Sheets and Airtable
Best for: internal planning, budgets, and judging at small events. Price: free plans available.
Spreadsheets are the most common judging tool, and they work with two or three judges. Past that, weighting, judge assignment, normalizing scores between strict and generous judges, and locking results all become formulas someone must build and check under pressure. How to replace hackathon spreadsheets covers when to move off them, and hackathon judging software covers what the replacement should do. To build the rubric itself, try the free judging criteria builder.
For certificates, a design tool such as Canva plus a mail merge works at small scale; a QR certificate generator issues verifiable ones from the event records. For feedback, any survey form will do, but survey answers are most useful when they sit next to registration and results data. That is what event analytics for hackathons is about.
Three ready-made hackathon tool stacks
The free stack (under 50 participants)
Luma or Google Forms for registration, Discord for chat and team-finding, the free random team generator for in-person splits, GitHub for code, Google Forms for submissions, Google Sheets for scores, and Canva for certificates.
Cost: nothing but prizes. Trade-off: about six handoffs between tools, each one done by hand. Budget organizer time for it, keep judging simple, and test the submission form end to end before the event.
The mid-size stack (50 to 300 participants)
A hackathon platform for registration, teams, submissions, judging, the reveal and certificates, with Discord or Slack alongside for conversation, Zoom or OBS for the online parts, and GitHub or itch.io for the work itself.
Cost: from $99 per event on HackathonHost, plus prizes. Trade-off: one more tool to learn, in exchange for removing almost every manual handoff at the stages where mistakes are public.
The recurring or corporate stack
Everything in the mid-size stack, plus white-label branding, participant data you own and can export, a blacklist for people who broke your code of conduct, reusable setup from one event to the next, and analytics you can hand to leadership or sponsors.
Cost: HackathonHost stays at the same flat price per event; universities get three free events a year. Trade-off: you need someone to own the platform setup, which is usually the same person who used to own the spreadsheets.
If you are weighing a full-service agency against doing it yourself with these tools, agency versus in-house and the best hackathon hosting services compare the models.
How to choose tools to host a hackathon
Ask six questions of every tool before you commit to it:
- Which stage does it own? If you cannot name one, you do not need it.
- Where does its data go next? Every export is a handoff someone must do by hand, on time.
- Does it hold up at your size? Try it with realistic numbers, not a demo account.
- Can you change something once? A moved deadline should update everywhere at once.
- What does it cost at your headcount? Per-seat pricing grows with success; compare pricing models before you budget.
- Who owns the data afterward? You will want it for the next event, the sponsor report and your mailing list.
The best test is a dry run. Register a few fake participants, form two teams, submit two projects, score them as two judges, and issue a certificate. The stage where that dry run slows down is where your real event will slow down too. For a longer evaluation, see what event platform reviews miss and our comparison of hackathon management tools.
FAQ
What tools do you need to host a hackathon? One tool for each of nine jobs: an event page and registration, promotion, team formation, communication, collaboration, the live event, submissions, judging and the reveal, and certificates and reporting. A purpose-built platform such as HackathonHost covers most of them in one place; chat and code hosting usually stay in Discord or Slack and GitHub.
What is the best free tool to host a hackathon? There is no single free tool that covers a whole hackathon. A free stack of Google Forms or Luma, Discord, GitHub, Google Sheets and Canva works for small events. Universities can run three events a year on HackathonHost for free, which covers registration through certificates in one workspace.
Can you host a hackathon with Discord alone? You can run the conversation on Discord, and many public hackathons do. Discord does not handle registration approvals, submissions with required fields, weighted judging or certificates, so you still need tools for those stages.
What software do companies use for internal hackathons? Usually Slack or Microsoft Teams for communication, plus a platform or spreadsheet for registration, submissions and judging. Companies tend to need private participant data, single-company branding and a report leadership can act on, which is why internal programs often move to a white-label platform. See how to run a corporate hackathon.
Do I need a hackathon platform for a small event? Not always. Under about 50 participants with two or three judges, free tools are fine if someone owns each handoff. A platform starts paying for itself when you have multiple judges, public voting, sponsors to report to, or a second event on the calendar.
How much do hackathon tools cost? Anywhere from nothing to an enterprise contract. Most individual tools in this list have free plans. Hackathon platforms price per seat, per event or by quote; HackathonHost charges a flat $99 per event with no per-participant fees.
One place for the event, the tools you like for the rest
You do not have to choose between a platform and your favorite tools. Keep Discord, GitHub and the whiteboard your participants already use, and move the stages where mistakes are public (registration, teams, submissions, judging, the reveal and certificates) into one workspace. Create your first event on HackathonHost, and read how to host a hackathon for the step-by-step plan.
