When should you run your hackathon?

Most organizers pick a date from their own calendar and find out about the three competing events the week registrations stall. We can see the collision first.

Built from 10,676 tracked hackathons, 12,349 quality scores, 12,237 organizers and 6,010 sponsors.

Nobody else can see the calendar you're planning against

Seasonality needs years of events, not this year's. We hold 10,676 hackathons with dates, so 'is November quiet for AI hackathons in Germany' is a real answer rather than a hunch.
Clash detection needs a live view across every platform at once. We're currently tracking 671 upcoming events from Devpost, Luma, Devfolio, MLH, DoraHacks and dozens more. The whole point is that your competition isn't listed where you are.
We record when an event first appeared as well as when it runs, so we can tell you how far ahead comparable organizers announce. That gap doesn't exist in any public dataset; it's a side effect of scraping daily for years.
Where our coverage is a floor rather than a complete picture, as it is with clashes, we say so on the result instead of letting you read it as 'the weekend is free'.

Free tools, powered by the world's largest hackathon dataset. Browse it yourself.

What we measure

Seasonality comes from every event we have ever tracked with a start date, which is a large and stable sample.
Clash detection only covers upcoming events we already track, so treat it as a floor rather than a complete picture.
Lead-time advice compares your date against the median gap between an event first appearing in our data and starting. That is a fact about what other organizers do, not a rule we invented.

Questions

Does 'no clashes' mean the weekend is free?

No. It means we don't currently track a competing event in that window. New events are announced constantly, and coverage is never total.

How much lead time do I need?

Look at the median announcement gap on your result. That is what comparable organizers actually do, measured across everything we track. Short notice is one of the most common things dragging a listing's score down.