Brilliant Review - Is it the right choice for you?

If you've ever watched a YouTube video on a thought-provoking topic, chances are that you've heard of Brilliant. The platform is notorious for sponsoring interesting YouTube videos to promote their platform, which has already been used by more than 10 million learners.

But is Brilliant the right learning platform for YOU? And what do they even offer?

Let's find out in this full Brilliant review!

What is Brilliant?

Brilliant is an online learning platform that focuses on teaching fundamental concepts of math, physics, computer science, scientific thinking and most other STEM topics through interactive online courses. In total, they have a library of more than 60 courses, created by some of the smartest minds from universities like MIT, Caltech & more.

Founded in 2012 by Sue Kim, the platform now has more than 3.5 million monthly visitors and has served more than 10 million learners already.

Let's see what their platform has to offer!

Courses

Core to Brilliant is their collection of 60+ courses on topics like math, computer science, statistics, physics and scientific thinking. You learn through high-quality, interactive courses with lots of challenges to solve along the way.

Daily problem

Every day, there's a new little challenge to solve, which keeps you engaged and lets you learn something new every day.

Mobile app

Through the Brilliant mobile app, you can learn about math, science & economics all while you're traveling. The app has 4.7 stars with more than 10,000 App Store reviews total and is available for iOS and Android.

Pro & Cons

Who is Brilliant for?

Brilliant is the ideal platform for curious people. It focuses not so much on hard skills that you can apply to your everyday life immediately, but more on getting a grasp of the underlying concepts that shape most of today's reality. Through Brilliant, you can learn to see the world with a more knowledgeable view, including a better understanding of science.

Brilliant is right for you if:

• you are curious by nature and want to learn something new

• you're in college or starting a professional career in a STEM field

• you want to refresh your knowledge of important scientific concepts

Brilliant pricing

Brilliant comes as a subscription service, that you can subscribe to on a monthly ($24.99/month) or a yearly basis ($12.49/month). Both of these plans include:

• The entire course library

• Entire Daily Challenges archive

• Synced progress across web and mobile apps

• Offline mode on mobile apps

In addition to that, they also have a gift plan, where you can get a lifetime license of Brilliant for $749.99.

There's also a free option available, which will give you access to the daily problem and the introduction of all the other courses. Though, if you want access to the full course library, you will have access to the premium plan.

Brilliant refund policy

Generally speaking, Brilliant doesn't grand any refunds (as written in their Terms of Use), but they stated that they do make exceptions to this from time to time. They recommend you use their 7-day free trial to test out whether Brilliant is the right platform for you.

Brilliant for businesses / groups

Brilliant currently doesn't offer a dedicated business plan, however they do give you the ability to purchase a group subscription. These group subscriptions cost

$24.99/month for the first 3 seats, then $9.99/month for each extra seat, and give each of the members access to the entire Brilliant course library.

As the plan isn't a dedicated business plan, there are no features like learning insights, custom learning tracks and reporting capabilities.

If you're looking for a solution to upskill your employees, you might be better of with platforms like Pluralsight or Udemy, which offer dedicated business plans that help you manage your workforce.

Brilliant for educators

If you're an educator, you can apply to Brilliant for Educators to receive access to a free premium license.

To get access to this program, you have to send your application there, verifying your education status. You also have to be part of an eligible institution, like:

• A K-12 school

• An accredited college or university

• A trade school

• A post-graduate institution

Once your application has been accepted, you will get free access to the entire course library, and you can even give free access to up to 6 courses to each of your students.

Brilliant for students

As of September 2024, Brilliant doesn't offer a discounted student plan.

Learning & Customer support

Brilliant doesn't offer as much support as other platforms might do, as their focus is more on creating new courses and sparking curiosity than it is about learning new hard skills to apply to your job. They do offer a self-service knowledge base, and they also have a support email you can write to if you're facing any kind of problems.

They also used to offer a support community, but it was shut down in 2021 as they didn't have enough staff to maintain it properly. As an alternative, some users have decided to create their on community on Discord, but it's not affiliated with Brilliant, so there's no official moderation.

Overall, you're not going to receive as much learning support on Brilliant, but then again, the platform was never really built to accommodate that in the first place.

Certification

There's currently no certification available for completing Brilliant courses. After all, it's more about being curious and training your brain than it is about learning skills to advance your career (even though Brilliant courses can certainly help with that as well).

Create a Brilliant account

To create your Brilliant account, just click on the “Get started” button on their homepage.

From there, you will have to go through a short sequence of questions they ask to get to know you and which topics you're interested in. After you're done with that, you can create your account, either by entering an email and a password or by logging in with Google or Facebook.

Popular courses on Brilliant

Logic

Train your logic with all the problem-solving exercises included in this course and go through the 18 interactive exercises to learn about Binary, Logic Gates, Combinatorics & more.

Train your logic

Scientific Thinking

Train your scientific thinking with 22 quizzes and more than 175 concepts. Learn about Balances, Electric Circuits, Heat Flow, Quantum Superposition & more in just this one course.

Train your scientific thinking

Computer Science Fundamentals

Learn the key ideas with 15 interactive quizzes and more than 125 concepts & exercises. Learn about concepts like Binary Search, Decision Trees, Greedy Algorithms and more – no coding required.

Get started with computer science

Brilliant instructors

Brilliant's instructors are mathematicians, PhDs and educators from top institutions like MIT, the Johns Hopkins University or Cambridge. In addition to their 12 lead instructors, there are also more than 70 contributors from various fields that helped to but the courses to life.

Meet Zandra Vinegar, the Director of Mathematics at Brilliant, with a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT. Before coming to Brilliant, she was a curriculum developer at the Museum of Math in Manhattan. You can find her work in the various math courses available on Brilliant.

If you want to learn more about the different instructors, check them out on Brilliant's instructor bio page.

Summary: Is Brilliant worth it?

Overall, I would say that Brilliant is definitely worth it! It's for sure not the right platform for everyone, but every naturally curious person will love Brilliant for their thought-provoking exercises and quizzes.

You'll like Brilliant if:

• you're naturally curious

• you enjoy learning new things

• you have a thing for science, math & statistics

• you're not here to learn a specific career relevant skill

Sounds like you? Then I'd definitely give Brilliant a try!