Head to head
Cred Farmer vs ClaudeArchitectGuide.com: which should you use?
Cred Farmer scores higher under every reader profile published here, but ClaudeArchitectGuide.com scores higher on value and access.
Cred Farmer publishes this comparison and is one of the two platforms in it. Every figure below links to ClaudeArchitectGuide.com's own page and carries the date we read it. The verdict is computed from published weightings, not written by us.
Who wins, by what you need
Each row is that profile's published weighting applied to both platforms' criterion scores. Nothing here is hand-assigned: change the weights and the winners change.
| If you say… | Cred Farmer | ClaudeArchitectGuide.com | Better fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced overall | 90 | 69 | Cred Farmer |
| I want one system for all four exams | 92 | 71 | Cred Farmer |
| I only need one exam | 92 | 69 | Cred Farmer |
| I want the best free option | 89 | 78 | Cred Farmer |
| I learn from video or an instructor | 52 | 41 | Cred Farmer |
| My exam is in two weeks | 96 | 77 | Cred Farmer |
| I am preparing a team | 82 | 56 | Cred Farmer |
What each one is better at
Where ClaudeArchitectGuide.com is stronger
- Everything is free with no account whatsoever: every question, every practice mode and the full progress view are open on first visit, and the site states in its own FAQ that there is no paid tier and nothing is held back.
- The CCAR-F mock publishes its exact sampling rather than asserting realism: 65 items in 120 minutes drawn 17/12/13/13/10 across the five blueprint-weighted domains, stratified so that, in the site's words, "every objective contributes an item before any contributes a second, which is what stops a 65-item form leaving whole objectives untouched."
- The readiness figure is gated on measured performance: the timed mock is the only mode that feeds it, and the one long explained mode is excluded from it by name. "The extended run reveals the key after every answer, so its score is not a readiness signal and does not appear as one."
- Practice for CCAR-F goes well beyond a single bank: a guided 65-item untimed run with rationales, a 120-item extended run, a 21-item quick quiz, a 30-item deck targeted at your weakest objectives, 5 domain drills and 30 per-objective drills, all free.
- Exam facts are sourced and dated rather than asserted: the price table records that "Prices were last checked against Anthropic's own certification FAQ on 13 August 2026", and where no figure is published the site prints that instead of inventing one.
- The published pool structure reconciles: per-domain counts (54/36/40/40/30) and per-objective counts both sum to the stated 200, and the mock's 17/12/13/13/10 draw tracks the published domain weights.
- Value and access: scores 5/5 against our 4/5.
Where Cred Farmer is stronger
- Team and operational readiness: we score 3/5 against their 0/5.
- Structured learning: we score 5/5 against their 3/5.
- Practice depth: we score 5/5 against their 3/5.
- Retention system: we score 5/5 against their 3/5.
- Certification coverage: we score 5/5 against their 4/5.
- Mock-exam realism: we score 5/5 against their 4/5.
Feature by feature
Expand any cell to see the words we read and where we read them. If a link no longer says what we quote, the figure is out of date and we want to know.
| Cred Farmer | ClaudeArchitectGuide.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Certifications covered | All four: CCAO-F, CCDV-F, CCAR-F and CCAR-P, in one account, each with five timed forms, drills by objective, a readiness score, a study guide mapped to the published domains and a flashcard deck.Evidence“Study guides mapped to every domain, spaced-repetition flashcards, and five timed forms per exam built to its published blueprint are available across all four tracks, and every timed form contributes blueprint-based practice evidence.” | Practice banks for three of the four Claude exams (CCAR-P, CCAR-F and CCDV-F): 600 questions across 93 objectives. CCAO-F (Associate) is described on the /certifications reference page but has no practice bank.Evidence“Three of the four: CCAR-P, CCAR-F, CCDV-F.” |
| Practice questions | 1,180, every option explained. 300 CCAO-F, 265 CCDV-F, 300 CCAR-F and 315 CCAR-P across the four gated banks, every item tagged to a published domain and objective and practised in the timed forms, in drills by objective or by domain, and in drills built from your own misses. A separate public set feeds the no-account practice papers and samples.Evidence“1,180 questions written to the published exam blueprints, five timed forms per exam at the real exam's length and time limit, and a reason for every option, right or wrong, so you learn from each mistake.” | 200 original CCAR-F questions tagged to all 30 blueprint objectives across 5 domains. Per-domain pools are published (54/36/40/40/30, summing to 200) and per-objective counts are published for all 30 objectives, ranging 5 to 8 each. Site-wide total is 600 across the three banks.Evidence“200 original questions for the CCAR-F exam, tagged to every one of the 30 objectives in its published blueprint, with a 65-item timed mock on the real 120-minute clock and a score report that grades you objective by objective.” |
| Study material | Exam-focused study guides. One per certification, organised by the published domains and objectives, with written hands-on labs, a glossary and per-domain cheat sheets, and a public study guide per certification that reads with no account. Written material only: no video and no instructor.Evidence“Focused Study Guides Structured chapters mapped directly to the exam objectives.” | Objective mapping for CCAR-F is detailed: a domain-weight table, per-objective question counts, one flashcards page holding 30 objective cards, 5 domain drills and 30 per-objective drills. Long-form study material is CCAR-P only. The site's single study guide (/guide) is the CCAR-P guide, four of the five blog articles are CCAR-P-titled and the fifth compares all four exams. The site states the limitation itself.Evidence“only the Professional Architect blueprint is covered in depth anywhere on this site.” |
| Full-length timed mocks | 20 full-length timed forms: five per certification at the real item count and 120-minute clock (60 / 53 / 60 / 63 items), each built to its published domain weights, four as mock exams and the fifth an objective-mastery form. The CCAR-F forms each present four of the six published scenarios with their items grouped under them. Flag items as you go, then review the reason for every option by domain and by objective.Evidence“In length, they match: every timed form in your account has the real exam's question count and time limit (CCAO-F 60 questions in 120 minutes, CCAR-F 60 questions in 120 minutes, CCAR-P 63 questions in 120 minutes and CCDV-F 53 questions in 120 minutes).” | A 65-item timed mock on a 120-minute clock, nothing revealed until submit, scored on a 100-1000 scale against the 720 cut. The draw is stratified by objective inside blueprint-weighted domains (D1 17, D2 12, D3 13, D4 13, D5 10) and redrawn from the 200-item pool each sitting, with unlimited repeats and a countdown that runs against the wall clock so a sitting can be resumed. Four further non-mock forms exist: a guided 65-item untimed run with rationales, a 120-item extended run, a 21-item quick quiz and a 30-item targeted deck.Evidence“A full-length Foundations practice exam under real conditions: 65 questions in 120 minutes, drawn in the same domain proportions as the published CCAR-F blueprint, with nothing revealed until you submit.” |
| Flashcards | Yes: a rapid-recall deck per certification inside the account, served through a spaced-repetition drill, plus a 40-card open deck per certification with no account.Evidence“Flashcard drills resurface each concept right before you'd forget it.” | 30 cards, one per CCAR-F objective, in blueprint order on a single page, each linking to that objective's practice questions. They are a read-only reference rather than a self-test: the answer side is always visible, so there is no flip-and-grade loop.Evidence“answers are shown, not hidden.” |
| Spaced repetition | Yes: an SM-2 scheduler, scheduling each card individually from a four-way rating, with lapses requeued inside the same session.Evidence“Study guides mapped to every domain, spaced-repetition flashcards, and five timed forms per exam built to its published blueprint are available across all four tracks, and every timed form contributes blueprint-based practice evidence.” | No spaced-repetition scheduling is published: no intervals, no review-due dates and no SRS algorithm appears on any page checked. The nearest mechanic is the mistakes deck, ordered oldest-miss-first, which retires an item after two correct answers in a row.Evidence“Mistakes deck Everything you have got wrong, oldest miss first. Two clean answers retire an item.” |
| Diagnostics | Objective-level: every timed form is scored by domain and by objective, the weakest domains are ranked from measured results and linked to the chapter that covers them, and each objective you got wrong routes you to a drill on it. Drills can also be built by domain or from your own misses.Evidence“Beside the score, each objective you got wrong routes you to a drill on that objective.” | No separate diagnostic mode or placement test. The cold timed mock is explicitly positioned as the diagnostic and the recommended first step, and it returns a score report that grades you objective by objective; the 21-item quick quiz is offered as a shorter temperature check.Evidence“Sitting a mock cold is a diagnostic.” |
| Readiness / adaptive path | A per-certification readiness score gated on measured answers: 60% performance, 40% preparation (study path, objective coverage and streak). The first sitting of each form, guided or timed, sets the band and preparation moves the score only within it: below the pass mark it stays under 60, and Exam-ready (90) needs a first-sitting average of 800. Drills, re-sits and the diagnostic never count as evidence, and a study section counts only when its checkpoint questions are answered correctly. Set an exam date and the hours you can give, and a dated plan lays the work out day by day: sections to read, drills on objectives measured weak, and full-length mocks spread across the days before the exam. It says when the work does not fit, and it makes no pass prediction.Evidence“Study path progress, objective coverage and your streak move the score within that band, never past it.” | A readiness figure exists and is gated on measured performance: only the timed mock feeds it, because every other mode reveals the key, and the 120-item extended run is excluded by name. Adaptive selection is limited to a 30-item targeted deck drawn from your weakest objectives; no adaptive item difficulty or IRT is claimed.Evidence“The timed mock is the only CCAR-F mode that feeds a readiness figure.” |
| Free tier | All free during open beta: all four certifications, every study guide, every timed form and every drill. With no account: a timed practice paper, six sample items, a 40-card deck and a study guide per certification; the rest needs a free account.Evidence“Right now, Cred Farmer is completely free while we are in open beta.” | Everything is free, and not as a free tier over a paid product: the site states there is no paid tier at all and nothing is held back. No /pricing page exists (HTTP 404). The one page that could plausibly have hidden a paid product, /courses, is a reference page comparing Anthropic's free courses with its paid certifications.Evidence“All of it. Every question, every practice mode and the whole progress view are free with no account and no sign-up. There is no paid tier and nothing is held back.” |
| Price | $0 while in open beta. No paid tier is published and no pricing is announced for after the beta.Evidence“Individual preparation is free while in open beta.” | $0. No paid product, no upsell and no pricing page: /pricing returns HTTP 404. The dollar figures that appear on the site ($99 to $175) are Anthropic's own exam fees, not this site's.Evidence“Free, and yours alone. No account, no sign-up, and your answers stay in this browser.” |
| Account required | Yes for the full study guides, the five timed forms per exam, the drills, the readiness score and the dated plan: a free account via Google or GitHub sign-in. The practice paper at /practice/<code>, the sample items, the open flashcard decks, the public study guide on each certification page, the blog and this comparison need no account.Evidence“To maximize security, we only use OAuth (Google and GitHub).” | No. There is no account, no sign-up and no login route at all. Every mode including the full progress view is reachable on first visit; progress is written to the browser's local storage, kept separately per exam, and never uploaded.Evidence“In your browser's local storage, per exam.” |
| Team support | An organisation layer, in pilot and set up on request: a cohort dashboard showing each consenting member's readiness score, gate state and mock count, member and invitation management, and recorded exam-fee sponsorship offers against a readiness bar the organisation sets. No published seat pricing, no self-serve creation and no procurement route yet.Evidence“Set the readiness score you are willing to fund at, see who has crossed it, and record an offer against a certification.” | None. No teams, seats, cohorts, manager dashboard or organisation billing appears on any page checked, and the architecture rules it out: there is no account system and all state is per-browser. /teams, /login, /signup and /account all return a real HTTP 404.Evidence“Your answers, scores and bookmarks are written to this browser's local storage and are never uploaded.” |
| States independence from Anthropic | Yes: stated in the footer of every page and repeated on the certification pages.Evidence“Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Anthropic or Pearson VUE.” | Prominent and repeated: a dedicated homepage FAQ answer, a 'Free · unofficial · no sign-up' badge above the fold, and a sitewide footer disclaimer on every page stating no affiliation, that the questions are original rather than recalled from a sitting, and that data stays in the browser. The author is named (Junaid Muhammad) with LinkedIn and GitHub links.Evidence“No. This is an independent, unofficial study resource with no affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from Anthropic.” |
Which to choose
Choose ClaudeArchitectGuide.com if…
- You want to start practising in the next minute without creating an account. Cred Farmer opens one timed paper per code without an account but keeps its forms, drills and progress behind a Google or GitHub sign-in; this site has no login route at all, and the full progress view works on first visit.
- You do not want a study record on somebody else's server. Answers, scores and bookmarks are written to your browser's local storage and are never uploaded, where Cred Farmer stores your progress server-side against an account.
- You are revising on a locked-down, shared or work machine where you cannot or would rather not sign in to a third-party service. Nothing here requires an identity.
- You have already worked through a fixed set of mock papers and want fresh forms rather than re-sitting the same ones: the CCAR-F mock is redrawn from the 200-item pool on every sitting with unlimited repeats, while Cred Farmer ships five fixed papers per exam that you can exhaust.
- You want to see exactly how a mock is sampled before you trust its score: the per-domain draw and the objective-rotation rule are both published, item by item.
Choose Cred Farmer if…
- You want to practise the way the exam is sat: five full-length timed forms per exam at the real item count and clock, with a reason for every option when you review.
- You want each study session chosen by what you got wrong: every missed objective routes you to a drill on it, and you can drill by domain or from your own misses.
- You have booked an exam and want an honest read of your practice results, from a score capped by your first sitting of each form rather than by activity, and a dated plan that lays out each day until the exam.
- You want to sit a free timed practice paper for your exam right now, with no account, and see a raw score by domain.
- You expect to sit more than one Claude certification and want one setup for all four.
- You are preparing other people and want to see who is measurably ready, with each person opting in, before you fund an exam.
What ClaudeArchitectGuide.com does not offer
- Publishes no CCAO-F practice bank: the Associate exam is described on the certifications reference page only.
- Publishes no CCAR-F study guide; the site's single long-form guide covers CCAR-P, and the site says so itself.
- Publishes no spaced-repetition scheduling and no scheduled review across the syllabus: the mistakes deck is the only re-serve mechanic.
- The 30 CCAR-F flashcards display their answers rather than hiding them, so there is no flip-and-grade self-test loop.
- No account means no cross-device sync and no recovery: progress lives only in the local browser, and clearing browser data clears it permanently.
- No team, seat, cohort or manager-reporting features of any kind; /teams and /login return HTTP 404.
- Publishes one mock format per exam page rather than a set of separate fixed papers: repeat sittings are fresh draws from the same 200-item pool.
Observable gaps in what the site publishes, not judgements about quality. We have run no blind review of anyone's questions, including our own, so nothing here compares how good the content is, only what each platform offers.
Sources
- https://claudearchitectguide.com Homepage: coverage of three of the four exams, the 600-question / 93-objective site total, the no-paid-tier and no-sign-up statements, and the independence FAQ answer.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/ccar-f CCAR-F hub: the 200-question bank tagged to 30 objectives, the domain-weight table and per-objective counts, the mistakes-deck mechanic, and the local-storage and no-sign-up statement.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/ccar-f/exam Timed mock specification (65 items / 120 minutes / blueprint-proportioned draw / nothing revealed until submit), the mock-as-diagnostic framing, and the readiness gating.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/ccar-f/flashcards The single flashcards page holding 30 objective cards, and its statement that answers are shown rather than hidden.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/ccar-f/extended The 120-item extended run and its explicit exclusion from the readiness figure.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/certifications Reference table covering all four exams, the dated price sourcing and 'not published' policy, and the concession that only the Professional Architect blueprint is covered in depth.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/guide The site's only long-form study guide, titled for Claude Certified Architect – Professional, establishing that the long-form material is CCAR-P.
- https://claudearchitectguide.com/sitemap.xml 138 URLs; per-objective drill URLs counted independently to confirm 30 (CCAR-F) + 38 (CCAR-P) + 25 (CCDV-F) = 93 objectives, and the absence of any CCAO-F bank.
All read on 3 September 2026. Found something wrong? Email hello@credfarmer.com and it will be corrected.
Common questions
Is ClaudeArchitectGuide.com better than Cred Farmer?
Cred Farmer scores higher under every reader profile published here, but ClaudeArchitectGuide.com scores higher on value and access. Under the balanced weighting, ClaudeArchitectGuide.com scores 69 and Cred Farmer scores 90 out of 100. The weightings are published and adjustable, so the honest answer depends on which exam you are sitting and what you can spend.
Is this comparison independent?
No. Cred Farmer publishes it and is one of the two platforms in it. That is why the rubric is published, every figure links to ClaudeArchitectGuide.com's own pages with the date it was checked, and the verdict above is computed from those published weightings rather than written by us.
Is ClaudeArchitectGuide.com an official Anthropic product?
No. Neither is Cred Farmer. Anthropic publishes the exam guides and Pearson VUE delivers the exams; every platform in this comparison is independent of both.
How current are these figures?
Everything here was read on ClaudeArchitectGuide.com's own site on 3 September 2026. Prices, question counts and free tiers change without notice, so follow the source links before you rely on a figure, and email hello@credfarmer.com if you find one out of date.
Other comparisons
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