HackNerds
Run your hackathon without the chaos
Screenshots
Features
- Set up a hackathon in minutes with one admin panel
- Accept applications or open registration, your call
- AI screening gives you a head start on application review
- Participants form teams, find teammates, and submit projects
- Define your own judging criteria and assign judges
- Scores aggregate automatically with final rankings
- Automated emails for reminders, follow-ups, and thank-yous
- Slack, Discord, and webhook integrations
- Bulk accept, reject, and export to CSV
- 10 languages out of the box
- Open source and self-hostable
HackNerds handles the stuff that makes hackathons hard to run: applications, team formation, submissions, judging, and communications. You set up the event. HackNerds handles the rest.
Running a hackathon is already hard enough. You're wrangling sponsors, finding judges, promoting the event, and fielding questions from a hundred participants. The last thing you need is to also build a spreadsheet system for tracking who applied, who got in, which team they're on, and what they submitted.
HackNerds takes that off your plate. Set up your event, configure the rules, and let the platform handle applications, teams, submissions, judging, and communications.
Set up once, run everything from one place
One admin panel. Set your dates, write the description, define judging criteria, and decide whether participants need to apply or can just register. Invite your staff and judges. That's it. You're ready.
As submissions come in and judging progresses, everything updates in real time. Spectators can follow along on the public page without refreshing.
Applications that don't bury you
If you turn on application review, HackNerds screens applicants with GPT-4 against criteria you define. Each application gets a recommendation: yes, no, or undecided. Use it as a starting point, then bulk accept or reject with one click.
You can customize the application form with standard fields and up to three custom questions. Need to export everything? CSV download, including custom question responses.
Teams and submissions just work
Participants form teams and find each other through GitHub username lookup. Teams that need more members can flag themselves as recruiting. When it's time, they submit a project with a title, description, and repo link.
Judging that stays organized
Define up to five criteria, each with its own weight and max score. Judges score independently. HackNerds aggregates everything, tracks progress per submission, and gives you the final rankings. No more merging spreadsheets at 2am.
Emails and integrations you don't have to think about
Set up automated emails for the moments that matter: 24-hour reminder, 1-hour reminder, post-event thank you, follow-up for no-shows, and notifications for applicants who didn't make it. Templates support placeholder tokens so every email feels personal.
Webhooks push events to Slack, Discord, or your own endpoints whenever something happens, like a new submission or an application decision.
Works for global events
10 languages included: English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Open source
The full codebase, database schema, seed data, and simulation scripts are on GitHub. Run it yourself or contribute.