Educative Review - Is it the right choice for you?

In 2024, you have lots of choice when you want to learn how to code. There are dozens of large learning platforms and thousands of YouTube channels, blogs, etc. Sometimes, this can be quite overwhelming.

In this post, we'll take a look at Educative, an online learning platform for developers with a unique approach to content.

Let's dive right in!

What is Educative?

Educative provides interactive courses for software developers with easy-to-use cloud environments. With more than 5 million monthly visitors, it's one of the most popular platforms in this space. The company was founded by Fahim ul Haq in 2016 and offers hundreds of courses for software developers, as well as a whole suite of other tools and resources to help their users learn new skills.

Let's see them in detail!

Educative courses

Educative's main offering is their library of hundreds of courses on programming languages & tech. What makes these courses special is that they're text-based, so instead of watching lots of videos, you go through interactive, written tutorials.

Learning paths

With learning paths, you can dive deep into a specific topic with multiple courses that focus on very specific knowledge. These are curated by Educative and help you acquire the relevant skills to pivot your career or to learn new skills.

Educative projects

Once you've built up some fundamental skills, you can use Educative's projects in order to test out what you know and to apply your learned knowledge. These projects can be completed in Educative's browser application, which saves you a lot of setup work with tech tools and lets you focus on learning new skills.

Skill assessment

With Educative's skill assessments, you can test out where you're standing and how you're doing when learning a new technology. You can take a quiz on a variety of topics to see how proficient you are and where you might need more training.

Pro & Cons

Who is Educative for?

Educative focuses heavily on software developers. Their platform is best for developers at all stages in their journey, whether they are complete beginners that want to start learning how to code or experienced developers that want to learn new skills.

Educative pricing

If you want to have access to Educative's full library of courses and features, you can upgrade to one of their premium subscriptions.

You can choose between the Standard Plan and the Premium Plan, which are both billed yearly, or you can get the Monthly plan (which is not recommended, as it's much more expensive).

Standard Plan

The Standard Plan is the basic plan you can purchase from Educative $16.66 USD/month or $199 USD billed annually. It includes:

• 12 months of unlimited access

• New courses every week

• Completion certificates

• Skill assessments

• Early access to new courses

Premium Plan

Next, there's the Premium Plan. It includes everything from the Standard Plan, plus:

• Projects

• Personalized learning plans

Lastly, there's the monthly plan, which costs $59.99 USD/month.

We'd not recommend getting the monthly plan, as it's much more expensive compared to the other plans.

Free courses

Educative also has a library of free courses that you can watch if you're unsure about buying the Educative subscription. When you're ready, you can upgrade to Educative Unlimited later.

If you take one of the free courses, you can also purchase a certificate for it at a one-time cost, instead of getting a full Educative subscription.

Refund policy

Educative offers a 7-day refund policy that you can use when you're unhappy about your purchase. You can find out whether you're eligible for refunds in the Educative Terms of Service.

Educative for businesses

If you want to upskill your employees when it comes to technical skills, Educative for business might be the right option for you.

In total, they offer 3 different plans for teams of different sizes and with different requirements.

Team Plan

The Team Plan costs $299/user/year and is best suited for teams of 3–25 users. It includes:

• Team management features

• Course library

• Learning paths

• Projects

• Completion certificates

• Personalized learning plans

and more.

Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise Plan costs $399/user/year and needs a minimum of 10 users. It includes everything from the Team Plan, plus:

• Team learning analytics

• Onboarding plan creation

• Usage & progress tracking

• Access to customer success team

• Custom content

and other advanced features for companies.

Enterprise Plan

Lastly, there's the Enterprise Plus Plan, which has custom pricing based on the specific requirements your company has.

Everything from Enterprise, plus:

• Dedicated customer success manager

• Analytics API

as well as other services for large companies, like LMS integrations, custom content creation and more.

Educative for students

As a student, you can get free access to a selection of courses from Educative through the GitHub Students Pack. In order to get this deal, sign up for the GitHub students account and claim these offers. In order to qualify, you will have to be currently enrolled in a recognized university and meet other requirements. You can find the detailed terms on the GitHub website.

Learning & Customer support

Educative has a self-service knowledge base that helps you with common questions about your account, billing, etc. For questions about the content of courses, you can ask questions in the Educative Answers forum to get help from instructors & fellow data science students.

For any other questions, you can also contact the Educative team directly through their email address.

Overall, the support options are pretty good.

Certification

When you finish a course on Educative, you'll get a certificate of completion which confirms that you took the course. Here's what it looks like:

These certificates aren't officially accredited, so they won't be recognized by universities, but they can nevertheless help you in your career as potential employers might acknowledge your skills.

Create an Educative account

To create your Educative account, click on the "Join for Free" button in the top right corner of their homepage. From there, you will be asked to enter your details, and you'll have your account shortly :)

Popular courses on Educative

Introduction to Big Data and Hadoop

Learn the fundamentals of big data and work with Hadoop clusters.

Check out the course

Operating Systems: Virtualization, Concurrency & Persistence

Learn about the basic principles of operating systems like CPU virtualization, memory, locks, semaphores, concurrency, persistence, etc.

Check out the course

The Good Parts of AWS: Cutting Through the Clutter

Learn which features of AWS you should definitely use and which others you might want to avoid. This course goes through the most fundamental services AWS offers such as DynamoDB, S3, EC2 and breaks down how it’s used, the pros and cons, why you should (or shouldn't) be using it, and more.
Check out the course

Educative instructors

Educative instructors are subject-matter experts in the software development world. They are hand-selected by Educative to fulfill their level of industry knowledge and quality criteria. Overall, instructors on Educative definitely know what they're doing.

Summary: Is Educative worth it?

Yes, we think that Educative is definitely worth it. If you want to learn how to code and don't mind consuming content through text and interactive exercises instead of watching videos, Educative is a great platform for you.

You'll love it for:

• Great selection of courses

• Intuitive browser editor (no setup required)

• Fair prices