Loops House vs Devpost

The hackathon platform that judges your code, not your pitch deck

This is for anyone choosing a hackathon platform, whether you're a DevRel or community team running a sponsor-driven public hackathon, or a company running an internal or customer-facing enterprise hackathon. Devpost is the name most people think of first, and for good reason. It's been the default for over a decade. Loops House was built more recently, for a different way of building. Here's what actually changes if you pick one over the other. (This is the first in a series, we'll cover other platforms in their own posts too.)

What is Devpost for Teams?

Devpost started in 2009, as ChallengePost, right as the app store and cloud computing boom was turning software into something anyone could ship fast. It's grown into the platform most companies think of first for hackathons. Devpost for Teams is its private hackathon product, a hub for running internal and customer-facing hackathons separately from Devpost's public site, handling registration, submissions, judging, and voting in one place. It's used across AI adoption hackathons, employee hackathons, and customer innovation events companies don't want public.

What is Loops House?

Loops House is a hackathon platform built for a different kind of builder: one shipping with Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex instead of a blank editor, where an AI agent is doing a large share of the implementation. It's built around three things: a Skill that installs a hackathon into a builder's IDE, a sponsor Co-pilot built from that sponsor's own docs, and an AI Judge that evaluates submissions on evidence instead of just a pitch.

What Loops House does differently

A mentor that's awake at 3am and actually knows the challenge. Every builder at a hackathon today is already asking an AI agent for help. The problem is that a generic agent gives a different answer depending on how you phrase the question, and it has no idea what a specific sponsor's challenge actually wants. Loops House's Co-pilot is built from the sponsor's own docs, so the sponsor gets to decide what the right answer is, and every builder gets a mentor who knows the challenge, available at any hour, not just when someone from the sponsor's DevRel team happens to be free at the mentor table.

A hackathon that lives where the code already is. One command, npx loopshouse add your-event-slug, and the whole event, bounties, docs, submission flow, installs into Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or VS Code. No tabbing out to a web portal to read the rules and back in to write code. Where we're heading next: giving sponsors visibility into how builders' AI agents actually interact with their SDK or challenge statement, something no hackathon platform has offered before, because none of them sit inside the IDE in the first place. That's not built yet, and we're still working out exactly what builders should expect a sponsor to be able to see before we ship it.

Judging that's split into what a machine can check and what a person should still decide. The AI Judge looks at the repo, the pitch, and the demo video together, and splits the evaluation into two kinds of scoring: objective factors like technical execution and whether the project actually matches the bounty, which can be checked directly against the code, and subjective factors like creativity and innovation, which stay closer to human judgment but get AI assistance for consistency across hundreds of submissions. We've somewhat cracked the objective half. The subjective half is still evolving, and we're actively working on making the evidence behind every score easier to trace back and argue with.

Devpost's judging tools take a different approach: organizers set scoring criteria and assign judges, with optional multi-round judging and voting built in, which works well when consistency across a very large or very public event matters most.

Early, but real

Loops House is newer than Devpost, so the honest comparison isn't scale, it's what's already worked. At Codex Community Hackathon Pune, 1,500+ builders registered, 300+ were selected, and 85 projects were scored live on a public evaluation board. At NextGen BioAgents, part of NY Tech Week, 23 projects shipped in a single day using AI skills built for each sponsor's stack.

Shay Beheshti, who co-directs growth for Nucleate NY, said Loops House "gave participants one place to ideate, access resources, and submit projects, making judging much easier."

Kenneth Umoekp, who built at the FilecoinTLDR Builder Challenge, said the platform "made me feel like I belonged on day one" as a first-time hacker.

Loops House vs Devpost, feature by feature

Which one fits your hackathon

Pick Devpost for Teams if you want a platform with a long operating history and want to run hackathons traditionally.

Pick Loops House if your hackathon is built around AI coding agents, you want builders working in their own IDE instead of a web form, or you want judging that traces back to what's actually in the codebase instead of resting on how well someone pitched it or if you're inviting external customers or partners and need controlled guest access and so much more.

Is Loops House a Devpost alternative?

Yes. Loops House is a hackathon platform you can run in place of Devpost for Teams, especially for events built around AI coding agents. The biggest differences are judging (an AI Judge reading the repo and citing evidence, versus configurable manual judging) and how builders work (inside their own IDE, versus a web portal).

Which platform is better for AI-native or agentic coding hackathons?

Loops House. Its Skill installs directly into AI coding agents like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, and its AI Judge evaluates submissions on the code, the pitch, and the demo together, with a specific eye on integration quality. Devpost for Teams supports AI hackathons as one event type among several, but it isn't built specifically around in-IDE agent workflows.

Have more questions about hosting on Loops House? The full FAQ lives on the Loops House homepage, including more on how the AI Judge works.

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Curious what an AI Judge would actually say about your last hackathon project? Explore live events on Loops House, or book a demo if you're planning to host one.