Learning through online courses has grown in popularity over the years. It’s never been easier to customize your education and focus on skills you care about. In this multi-billion dollar business, websites rope in course creators to build a system of user-generated educational resources. But which one is best?
Coursera and Udemy are two of the biggest course sites out there. Here’s a quick comparison to know which of these very different sites is best for you.
It does come down to that, doesn’t it? This round goes to Coursera. While Udemy does have some excellent course creators, Coursera offers certification programs that can actively help you get a job or start a career path.
Udemy has more courses, but Coursera focuses on quality over quantity. However, this does mean they fail in a few other categories that we need to discuss.
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This undoubtedly comes down to Udemy. The site is almost constantly running sales on courses, placing many of them at $19.99 or lower. In recent years, however, the company insisted that its creators charge more for their classes, effectively raising the median course price.
Even so, Coursera is much more expensive on average. Its certification program costs $39 per month and often requires at least six months of participation. Additionally, the site’s accredited online university programs can range in tens of thousands of dollars (depending on your location).
This is still better than the average tuition price for attending in-person college classes, but that doesn’t make it any easier to pay $32,000-plus for a degree online. Udemy is much more accessible, even though it doesn’t offer accreditation.
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Because the barrier to entry is so much lower, Udemy offers the largest pool of courses. Coursera focuses on quality and job placement (we’ll talk about this in a moment), which takes away from the quantity they’re able to offer.
Having the most courses doesn’t mean you’re the best, though. With Udemy, you must be more critical when analyzing reviews and determining if a course is right for you. Coursera guarantees quality in a way that Udemy can’t.
This is where Udemy gets some much-needed points. The site offers courses in over 60 languages. That’s primarily because it has a variety of course creators that speak a multitude of languages. Coursera has to certify and sometimes build its own courses, so it can’t always guarantee multilingual approaches.
At the end of the day, you’re a customer buying a product. You need quality support in case you run into any issues. After a thorough inspection, we were satisfied with both platforms’ customer support teams.
It was surprising after reading online reviews from social media platforms and forum sites, which cited inconsistencies with support from both sites. It just shows that you shouldn’t trust every piece of user-generated content.
Despite some backlash through reviews in recent years, we can safely say that Coursera and Udemy look after their customers in an equally pleasant and helpful way.
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It’s a good idea to advance your employee’s education if they’re in a committed contract with your company. Investing in their education means investing in your business. Thankfully, both Udemy and Coursera offer enterprise options.
You can track your employee’s progress and statistics, so you know how practical the training is, plus support from their business side of customer service. We have to give this round to Coursera because it’s much easier to manage customer support over a small, curated stock of courses than for individual classes on a site like Udemy.
The interface and user experience on Udemy can be a little clunky. It’s been updated recently but doesn’t quite hit home. Because course creators can decide what additional learning materials they include, courses can be confusing if they overload the student.
Coursera has a much more linear UI and better progress tracking. If you want to understand how well you’re doing in your courses, Coursera has clear explanations.
Another minor grievance about Udemy is that the company emails you more frequently than Coursera. The information isn’t always relevant, which affects the user experience.
Coursera wins here, though it’s a fairly close race. Udemy could stand to improve the user experience just a little bit more to stand toe-to-toe with Coursera.
Because Udemy wants creators to water down their course prices, some users report low-quality courses and request their money back. Coursera is built differently. It has a higher standard, even for its bottom floor.
In short, Udemy is excellent for learning basic skills, and Coursera is where you go to master those said skills. Start on Udemy to figure out what skills you want to learn without spending a lot of money, then move to Coursera once you’ve narrowed down what you want.
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