9 Best System Design GitHub Repos & Resources

A ranked guide to the best free system design resources on GitHub: the top repositories, what each one is good for, the official Grokking System Design repo, and where free material stops being enough.

The 9 best system design GitHub repositories at a glance

Why GitHub is a good place to learn system design

GitHub has become one of the largest free libraries for learning system design. Engineers have published primers, curated lists, case studies, and full sets of notes, all open and free to read. The problem is not finding material. It is the opposite: there are hundreds of repositories of wildly different quality, depth, and freshness, and it is hard to know where to start.

This guide cuts through that. It ranks the system design GitHub repositories genuinely worth your time, explains what each one is actually good for, and shows where a folder full of GitHub links stops being enough.

Quick answer: for most engineers, the best system design GitHub repo to start with is donnemartin/system-design-primer for fundamentals, paired with the official design-gurus/grokking-system-design repo for pattern-based interview preparation.

1. donnemartin/system-design-primer: the essential primer

donnemartin/system-design-primer is the natural first stop, and it is one of the most-starred repositories on all of GitHub for good reason. It is an organized walk through the fundamentals: scalability, latency versus throughput, the CAP theorem, caching, load balancing, database scaling, and more. It also includes sample interview questions worked through with diagrams, plus a set of Anki flashcards for review.

If you read only one repository, read this one. Treat it as your foundational reference and return to it often.

2. design-gurus/grokking-system-design: the official Grokking companion

design-gurus/grokking-system-design is the free, open companion to the original Grokking the System Design Interview course, published by the team that created it.

Where the Primer is organized around concepts, this repo is organized around patterns: a small set of reusable building blocks (caching, sharding, replication, consistency models, messaging, and more) that appear again and again across very different systems. Once you know the patterns, any new design problem feels familiar.

3. karanpratapsingh/system-design: a structured, course-style read

Primers and lists are reference material. If you want something closer to a course you read front to back, karanpratapsingh/system-design is the best option. It is a free, well-organized, book-style set of notes arranged in chapters, moving from fundamentals through to specific technologies and patterns.

Awesome system design resources: the curated lists worth bookmarking

4. ashishps1/awesome-system-design-resources

ashishps1/awesome-system-design-resources is the most popular of the recent curated lists, covering core concepts, common interview problems, and learning resources.

5. binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability

binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability is a large, well-maintained list of articles, conference talks, and real-world architecture write-ups focused on scalability and distributed systems.

6. madd86/awesome-system-design

madd86/awesome-system-design is another solid curated list of distributed systems resources.

7. checkcheckzz/system-design-interview: interview-focused practice

checkcheckzz/system-design-interview is one of the older and broadest collections of system design interview links and company examples.

8. chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design: ML system design

chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design focuses on designing machine learning systems: data, training, deployment, and monitoring.

9. kilimchoi/engineering-blogs: learn from real systems

kilimchoi/engineering-blogs is a curated list of engineering blogs from real companies.