Internal vs. External Hackathons: Choosing the Right Format for Your Goal

Not every hackathon needs the same participants, structure, or goals. An internal hackathon can help employees solve business challenges and develop new ideas, while an external hackathon can bring in fresh perspectives from developers, students, startups, customers, or other members of a wider community.

The right format depends on what you want to accomplish. Understanding the differences between internal and external hackathons can help you choose a format that fits your objectives, participants, resources, and desired outcomes.

What Is an Internal Hackathon?

An internal hackathon is an event organized for people within an organization. Employees from different departments, teams, or areas of expertise come together for a limited period to develop ideas, build prototypes, or solve specific challenges.

Because participants already understand the company, its products, and its processes, internal hackathons can be useful for addressing problems that require knowledge of the organization.

Common goals for an internal hackathon include:

• Developing new product or feature ideas
• Improving internal processes
• Exploring new technologies
• Encouraging cross-team collaboration
• Giving employees time to experiment with new ideas
• Finding solutions to specific business challenges

Key benefits:

• Lower cost and simpler to organize, since there is no outside recruitment
• Participants already know the business, so ideas start with real context
• Any intellectual property created stays inside the company
• Strengthens culture, morale, and collaboration across teams
• Easier to tie directly to internal priorities and existing projects

Main drawbacks:

• Ideas are limited to the perspectives already inside the company
• Pulling employees off their normal work has a real productivity cost
• Momentum can fade once everyone returns to their day jobs
• Without a follow-up plan, promising prototypes often go nowhere

Internal hackathons are one of the most effective ways to drive innovation from within your own company, turning employee ideas into prototypes the business can actually use.

What Is an External Hackathon?

An external hackathon opens participation to people outside the organization. Depending on the event, participants might include software developers, students, designers, entrepreneurs, customers, partners, or members of a technology community.

External hackathons allow organizations to bring together people with different experiences and perspectives. They can also help companies connect with potential talent, customers, technology partners, and communities.

Common goals for an external hackathon include:

• Generating ideas from outside the organization
• Engaging developers and technology communities
• Exploring new technologies or use cases
• Discovering potential talent
• Building relationships with customers or partners
• Increasing awareness of a product, platform, or technology

Key benefits:

• Access to a much larger and more diverse pool of ideas and skills
• Builds awareness and reputation for your product, platform, or API
• Creates real use cases and integrations from outside builders
• Opens a pipeline to potential talent, partners, and customers
• Grows an engaged developer community around your technology

Main drawbacks:

• More expensive, more complex, and more work to run well
• Success depends on recruitment and promotion, so a weak turnout is a real risk
• Participants need more context, onboarding, and support to be productive
• Intellectual property, prizes, and rules have to be settled clearly up front

When the goal is engaging developers over time, an external hackathon works best as part of a wider effort to scale your developer relations, rather than as a one-off event.

Internal vs. External Hackathons: What's the Difference?

The biggest difference is who participates, but the choice can also affect the event's goals, planning requirements, and potential outcomes.

Factors	Internal Hackathon	External Hackathon
Participants	Employees	Developers, students, startups, customers, partners, or other external participants
Primary focus	Internal innovation and problem-solving	Outside ideas, community engagement, and broader innovation
Company knowledge	Participants already understand the organization	Participants may need more context and resources
Audience reach	Limited to the organization	Can reach a much larger community
Coordination	Usually easier to manage	May require more participant communication and event support
Potential perspectives	Based largely on existing teams and expertise	Broader range of experiences and approaches
Common goals	Product development, process improvement, employee innovation	Talent engagement, ecosystem building, new ideas, and technology exploration

Neither format is automatically the right choice. The better option depends on the problem you are trying to solve and the people you need to involve.

How to Choose the Right Hackathon Format

Start with the goal rather than the format. Ask yourself what you want participants to accomplish and who is most likely to help you achieve it.

Choose an Internal Hackathon If:

• You Want to Solve an Internal Problem: If the challenge involves your company's workflows, systems, products, or operations, employees may already have the context needed to develop useful solutions.
• You Want to Encourage Employee Innovation: An internal hackathon can give employees dedicated time to experiment with ideas that may not fit into their regular responsibilities.
• You Want More Cross-Team Collaboration: Bringing employees from different departments together can encourage teams to approach problems from different perspectives while still working with people who understand the organization.
• You Are Exploring a New Product or Feature: Employees who work closely with an existing product can use a hackathon to prototype new features, test concepts, or explore potential improvements.

Choose an External Hackathon If:

• You Need Fresh Perspectives: People outside your company may approach a problem differently from your internal teams. This can introduce ideas or approaches your employees may not have considered.
• You Want to Engage a Developer Community: If community engagement is one of your goals, an external hackathon can create a structured way for developers and other participants to work with your technology. The challenge is keeping that momentum going afterward, since developer engagement often fades once the event ends without a plan to sustain it.
• You Want to Discover New Talent: Hackathons give organizations a chance to see how participants approach problems, collaborate, and build solutions in a practical setting.
• You Want to Explore New Uses for Your Technology: External participants may find applications for your platform, API, or technology that your internal teams had not considered.

Choose a Hybrid Format If You Need Both

You do not necessarily have to choose between an entirely internal or external event.

A hybrid hackathon can bring employees together with selected external participants. For example, employees might provide business context while developers, designers, or other participants contribute different technical or creative perspectives.

This format can work when a challenge benefits from both internal knowledge and outside ideas, although it may require additional planning to make sure all participants have the information, access, and support they need.

Learn how to find a hackathon management partner that fits your needs

5 Factors to Consider Before Planning Your Hackathon

Once you have identified your preferred format, consider the practical requirements of the event.

1. Your Goal

Define what you want to achieve before deciding who should participate. A hackathon focused on improving an internal workflow may require a different audience from one designed to explore new applications for a public API.

2. Your Participants

Consider who has the skills, knowledge, or perspective needed to work on the challenge. Your participant profile should follow your goal rather than the other way around.

3. Your Resources

Think about your budget, event team, technology, mentors, judges, prizes, communication channels, and participant support.

External events can require additional work around registration, onboarding, communication, technical access, and community engagement. If you are weighing whether to run one in-house or bring in help, it is worth understanding the real cost of a DIY developer event versus an agency.

4. Your Challenges

The challenge itself can help determine the format. If participants need extensive knowledge of internal systems or business processes, an internal event may be more practical. If the challenge is designed to encourage outside experimentation, an external audience may be more appropriate.

5. What Happens After the Hackathon

A successful hackathon does not necessarily end when the winners are announced. Decide in advance how promising ideas will be evaluated, developed, tested, or incorporated into future projects.

Matching the Format to Your Goal

The choice between an internal and external hackathon starts with your goal.

If you need employees to apply their knowledge of your organization, products, or processes, an internal hackathon may be the appropriate format. If you want to bring in outside perspectives, engage a broader community, or explore new ideas around your technology, an external hackathon may better fit the objective.

You also do not have to choose just one; organizations always use the same hackathon format for every project. You might run an internal hackathon to explore employee ideas and later organize an external event to see how a wider community approaches a related challenge. The two formats can also support different stages of an innovation program.

Before choosing a format, consider what you want to achieve, who can contribute to that goal, and what resources you have available to support the event.

Run Your Next Hackathon With BeMyApp

BeMyApp designs and runs both internal and external hackathons for global enterprises, from challenge design and participant recruitment to production, platform, and post-event reporting.

If you are deciding which format fits your goal, see how we organize hackathons end-to-end, and how we can help you choose and run the one that gets you there.

Book a discovery call →