Was ist ein Hackathon?

the short definition

A hackathon is a competition with a deadline. Organisers set a theme and a time limit, participants form teams, and every team spends that time turning an idea into something that runs. At the end each team demonstrates what it built, judges score the entries against published criteria, and prizes go to the strongest.

Four things make an event a hackathon rather than a workshop or a conference: it is time-boxed, work happens in teams, the output is something built during the event, and it is judged. An event missing any of the four is usually called something else on its own listing — a taller, a bootcamp, a meetup — and this directory follows whatever the organiser called it.

what the word means, and how it is spelled here

“Hackathon” joins hack and marathon. “Hack” is used in its older engineering sense — solving a problem quickly and inventively — and not in the sense of breaking into systems. “Marathon” describes the format: one continuous, fixed block of time rather than a series of sessions. So the word literally describes a long, uninterrupted stretch of inventive building, which is what the event is.

German uses three spellings for it and they all mean the same thing:Hackathon, the original form and the one most organisers put on their own listings; Hackaton, which drops the second h and is common enough that German search reports it as its own term of the same size; and Hack-a-thon, which spells the parts out. German capitalises nouns, so the word is written with a capital H mid-sentence where English would not. The plural is Hackathons either way. Nothing on this site is filed differently because of the spelling: an event is listed under the name its organiser gave it.

how a hackathon runs

The order is close to the same everywhere:

• Kickoff — the organiser sets out the theme, the rules, the judging criteria and the deadline.
• Team formation — people either arrive as a team or form one on the spot.
• Building — the bulk of the time, usually with mentors on hand.
• Submission — work stops at a hard deadline and teams submit whatever state their project is in.
• Demos — each team presents, typically in a few minutes.
• Judging and prizes — judges score against the criteria set at kickoff and announce winners.

the kinds of hackathon run in Germany

The one word covers several quite different events here, and working out which kind you are looking at tells you most of what you need to know before registering — who else will be in the room, how long you will be there, and whether anything is at stake beyond the prize.

• University hackathons — run by a faculty, a student society or a campus club, normally over a weekend and normally the largest by headcount. The technical universities are the visible ones: TUM in München is searched by name more than any other German organiser (“TUM hackathon” and “TUM AI hackathon” are both real query families), and RWTH Aachen, KIT in Karlsruhe, TU Berlin, TU Darmstadt and HPI in Potsdam run their own.
• Corporate Challenges — a company sets a challenge tied to its own business and runs it over a day or two, sometimes with a cash prize and a recruitment pipeline attached. Germany's industrial and enterprise-software base makes this the most common non-university format.
• Healthcare hackathons — a genuinely German recurring format rather than a one-off: the “Healthcare Hackathon” name runs as a series with regional editions, and it is the only vertical in this market with search demand of its own.
• Public-sector and civic events — federal ministries, state governments, research bodies and city administrations run open-data and civic-technology hackathons, often with a policy brief rather than a commercial one.
• Community and startup hackathons — organised by a meetup group, a coworking space, an accelerator or a technology vendor. Usually shorter, usually free, and usually announced only a few weeks ahead, which is why a calendar is worth checking more than once.
• Game jams — the same format applied to making a game rather than an application, most visibly around Global Game Jam each January. “Game jam” is the single largest filter term in this market, five times the size of any other.

The name shifts with the subject matter. A hackathon over datasets is usually aDatathon; one that stops at the idea and the pitch, with nothing built, is an Ideathon; one aimed at physical or hardware builds is a Makeathon; and a weekend of building a game is a game jam. They are all the same shape — a brief, a clock, teams, a demo — and this site lists each under the name its organiser used.

// the organisations named above are examples of the KINDS of hackathon run in Germany, taken from what those organisations are publicly known for. Nothing there is a claim about a specific edition, its dates, its size or its outcome — every event this directory lists has its own page, with the organiser's own description and a link to their listing.

how long they last

There is no standard length — the organiser sets it. Of the 37 hackathons listed on this site right now, 18 run inside a single day and 19 run across two or more. The longest currently listed is MunichTech EXPO, which runs 20 days (1.–20. Sept. 2026).

The two shapes you will meet most often in Germany are the weekend build of 24 or 48 hours, which starts on a Friday evening or Saturday morning and finishes with demos on the Sunday, and the single working day, which is what most corporate challenges and community events run. Shorter events are built around a narrow brief you can finish in one sitting. Longer ones leave room for a bigger build and normally put food, sleep and mentor sessions in the schedule.

what it costs to enter

Less than people expect, and usually nothing — kostenlose Teilnahme is the norm here. 14 of the 37 hackathons listed on this site publish a free ticket, 7 publish a price between €6.51 and €59.99, and 16 have not announced one yet. Where an organiser has published a figure it is on the listing, so you can check before registering. What a ticket price does not tell you is capacity: free events at universities and coworking spaces routinely cap places and close registration early.

do you need a team

Almost always, and the organiser sets the size rather than leaving it open — it is one of the first things stated on a listing, because it decides how you show up. The limits vary more than people expect, from a pair to a room, so read the one on the event you are entering rather than assuming. If you arrive alone, most events run a team-forming session at kickoff.

in person or online

Worth checking before you plan around one. Of the 37 hackathons listed here, 36 are in-person and 1 is hybrid, which still means a session you attend in the host city. Nothing on the calendar right now is online-only. The practical question is usually which host city you can get to, which is what the sections below are for.

where they happen in Germany

Not evenly, and not from one centre. Germany has no single capital of this the way some countries do: this directory groups every listing into ten city hubs, and each hub covers the area around it rather than the municipality alone — an event in Garching is listed under München, one in Bonn under Köln, one in Halle under Leipzig. That is why a city you can reach in an hour is worth checking even when your own town has nothing. Twelve further cities — Hannover, Bremen, Nürnberg, Münster, Bielefeld, Paderborn, Braunschweig, Göttingen, Oldenburg, Osnabrück, Wolfsburg and Kassel — are too far from any hub to be folded into one honestly, so they keep their own names in the listings instead.

The ten hubs are Berlin, München, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Köln, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Dresden and Karlsruhe, and each page says exactly which districts, towns and Bundesländer it covers. Lower Saxony, Bremen, Franconia, Westphalia and northern Hesse are deliberately left out of that grouping — an event in Hannover, Bremen, Nürnberg, Münster and Bielefeld keeps its own city name and shows under all events.

the types you'll see listed

Hackathons are usually named for their subject or their audience. These are the filters this directory keeps, with what is on each right now:

ai hackathons

A listing appears here when the organiser describes the event around AI or machine learning — the theme it is judged on, the tools teams build with, or the problem set it hands out. (18 listed)

game jams

A listing appears here when teams build a game inside a fixed time limit — video games or tabletop, solo or team, from a theme or a constraint handed out at the start. (7 listed)

Events are also split by format — in person, online or hybrid — and by city. You can browse every listing by city from the locations index.

who can enter

Hackathons are open to more than programmers: teams that win are usually a mix of engineering, design and someone who can present the idea clearly. Plenty of events are aimed squarely at people who don't write code, and say so in their own description — several of the ones listed here are built around no-code and AI-assisted tools, which is a fair part of why the format has stopped being a programmers-only event.

If it's your first one, the practical advice is to scope small. A finished small idea demos far better than an ambitious half-built one, because judging happens on what actually runs. Student events are the usual way in — university hackathons take beginners by design and run workshops alongside the build.

what you can win

Prizes are set per event and published on the listing. They are not always cash — mentoring, cloud credits, hardware, an incubator place and introductions are all common — and the amount varies enormously between a community jam and a sponsored event.

faq

find one to enter

This site lists every upcoming hackathon it can find in Germany, updated weekly. Browse all 37 upcoming events, narrow to ai hackathons or game jams, or pick a city from the locations index.

Running one? Submit your hackathon — free to list.