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. Here’s a quick comparison to know which of these sites is best for you.
Which platform has better courses?
It does come down to that, doesn’t it? This round goes to Coursera. While Udemy has some excellent course creators, Coursera offers certification programs that can help you get a job or start a career path.
Udemy has more courses, but Coursera focuses on quality over quantity. However, this means they fail in a few other categories we need to discuss.
Which platform has better pricing?
This undoubtedly comes down to Udemy. The site offers courses with pricing starting at $14.99. In recent years, however, the company insisted that its creators charge more for their classes, raising the median course price.
Even so, Coursera is much more expensive on average. Its certification program costs $49 monthly and often requires at least six months of participation. The site’s accredited online university programs can also 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+ for a degree online. Udemy is much more accessible, even though it doesn’t offer accreditation.
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Which platform has the most courses?
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 can 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 class suits you. Coursera guarantees quality in a way that Udemy can’t.
Which platform caters to different languages?
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 many languages. Coursera has to certify and sometimes build its courses, so it can’t always guarantee multilingual approaches.
Which platform has a better customer service experience?
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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Which platform is better for training employees?
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.
What about user experience?
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. Coursera has clear explanations if you want to understand how well you’re doing in your courses.
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 improve the user experience just a bit more to stand toe-to-toe with Coursera.
The final verdict
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 know without spending much money, then move to Coursera once you’ve narrowed down what you want.
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