GitHub Classroom has been retired: what can teachers use now?

Short answer: GitHub closed new sign-ups to GitHub Classroom on 26 May 2026 and retired it on 28 August 2026. The repositories your classes wrote are still there; the assignments, autograding and roster links are not. Teachers are moving to Classroom 50, Codio, CodeGrade or Uppcoder. Uppcoder runs the whole course: assignments with starter code and tests, a ready lab in the browser for every student, autograding, and grades back to Moodle, Canvas, Brightspace or Blackboard.

What GitHub retired, and what it kept

• Kept: GitHub accounts, repositories and organisations, so last term’s code is still there.
• Gone: the Classroom website, its APIs and related services.
• Being deleted under GitHub’s retention policies: classroom and assignment names, tests defined outside repositories, and LTI-integrated rosters.

The options teachers are looking at

Each works differently; this is how each describes itself.

• Classroom 50 — free and open source, from the nonprofit behind Harvard’s CS50. It stays on GitHub, with autograding in GitHub Actions, and needs an organisation on a paid GitHub plan. It has no coding environment of its own.
• Codio — GitHub’s commercial partner: courseware, coding environments in the browser, autograding and LMS sign-in. Institutions agree pricing with Codio.
• CodeGrade — grading for coding assignments with a browser editor; free for up to 50 students per course, with LMS grade sync on its paid plans.
• Uppcoder — a lab in the browser for every student, autograding, grades to the LMS over LTI 1.3, coursework kept in git, priced by course rather than per student.

A longer list, with every option’s sources and prices, is on GitHub: websson/github-classroom-alternatives.

How Uppcoder replaces what you used

• Template repositories → an assignment is a git repository with the brief, starter code, tests and a solution. It is tested before students get it: the solution must pass and the starter must fail.
• A repository per student → each student works in their own folder in the course lab and never sees anyone else’s work, the solution or the hidden tests.
• Autograding with GitHub Actions → students run the tests as often as they like; Submit freezes the work and the tests mark the frozen copy. A rubric, inline code review and written feedback cover the rest.
• Codespaces or a set-up laptop → a lab in the browser with the tools the course chose: VS Code, a terminal or JupyterLab. Students need no GitHub account.
• Roster links from the LMS → LTI 1.3: the class list comes from Moodle, Canvas, Brightspace or Blackboard, and grades go back to its gradebook.
• Student repositories in your organisation → every hand-in is pushed to a private repository per course, in Uppcoder’s git storage, your GitHub organisation or your own Forgejo or Gitea.

Two example assignments are public: python-autograded-assignment and java-autograded-assignment. The guide Autograde Python with tests and a rubric, inside Canvas or Moodle shows the whole loop.

What it costs

Plans are priced by course, not per student. Edu Educator is €29 a month or €290 a year for one educator, with three code labs of up to 30 students each, autograding and grading tools, and a 14-day free trial. Teachers leaving GitHub Classroom can have one course moved across for them, free until 30 June 2027 (apply by 15 December 2026).

The full comparison, with the costs of a class of 30 on each option, is on Uppcoder’s GitHub Classroom alternative page.

Questions teachers ask

Do students need a GitHub account? No.

Can we keep our work in our own GitHub organisation? Yes, or in Uppcoder’s git storage, or on your own Forgejo or Gitea server. It is plain git, readable without any of our tools.

Is the work backed up? Every app and lab on Uppcoder is copied every night to a separate server, and every hand-in is a tagged commit in the course’s repository.

Where does it run? On our own infrastructure, which can be kept to the region you choose, such as Europe or the United States.

Related: Uppcoder: build, run and teach software in the cloud