Top 7 Codeacademy Alternatives in 2025

Codeacademy has been around for over a decade and has helped literally millions of people get their start in tech.

No platform is perfect though:

• With so many members, students complain that it can take days to get feedback

• Their large library can mean some courses don’t get updated as often as they should

• Some lessons can feel overly basic, asking you to just copy and paste code as a way of learning - but without enough context to really understand what you’re doing

• While other students say that as topics get more complex, the course structure starts to fall apart

• And then there are the billing issues, with people being charged for lifetime memberships immediately after starting a free trial, or billed across multiple accounts with no easy refund

Now in all fairness to them, every platform has its pros and cons, and mistakes can happen.

The goal of this article is not to pile onto them, because Codeacademy offers solid content with some of it being completely for free. Not only that but they also have a lot of glowing reviews from people who love them. 

This guide is merely here to present some alternative platforms to learn from. So you can take a look, weigh the trade-offs, and decide which is the best one for you and your goals.

How this guide works

As you’re probably seen, there are a lot of platforms out there to help you learn to code. Some offer very basic courses, while others niche down and only teach around a single topic. I’ve shared some of these more niche options in the past in this guide here.

In this article though, I want to focus on platforms that are as similar to Codeacademy as possible. (And to also keep this list short).

That’s why each platform must:

• Teach a similar variety of coding and technical courses

• Be a platform that specializes in this, and not offer coding as a section of their courses

• Offer training from beginner to advanced

• And be of a similar price range. (If the experience is only slightly better but the cost is 5x then it’s probably worth saving your money)

I break them all down in detail below, but here are my 3 best options based on the most common criteria I hear from our students:

• ⭐ Best free platform: FreeCodeCamp

• ⭐ Best for beginners that want to get hired ASAP: Zero To Mastery

• ⭐ Best for upskilling: Frontend Masters

Click on any of those to jump to each section and see why we ranked them like this, or keep reading and I'll break down all of the options on this list, as well as their pros and cons.

Starting in alphabetical order, we have…

Code with Mosh

Code with Mosh has been around for a while now and he’s a super nice guy, with a huge following on YouTube.

He has a private community, courses on popular languages and frameworks, as well as learning paths for specific roles such as front-end, back-end, mobile or game development.

As for pricing, he offers 2 options. You can either pay a one off price from some courses which can be anywhere from $50 to $400 dollars. 

Or, you can purchase lifetime access to all his courses and future ones for $678 (although he does sometimes have deals on this).

Pros

• Low cost

• Lifetime pricing option (most sites don’t have this)

• Supportive community

• Multiple courses, broken down into set levels of comprehension

• Skill paths for careers

• Game development which isn’t something many course platforms cover

• He’s also added in training around passing the tech interview

Cons

• Less support than some other options. Due to the high demand (and low course cost), Mosh isn’t able to provide direct support. Instead, he fosters a community to help each other

Educative

Educative is another great option, with entirely tech focused courses.

Their course selection is quite frankly, ridiculous in its size, with over 500 combined courses and projects. Some are in depth beginner to mastery courses, while others are 2hr courses covering a specific feature or problem.

One thing I like that they’ve changed recently, is they’ve added in an AI chat feature to help you navigate all this.

You can tell the chatbot the career you’re thinking of, and then it will narrow down lessons in their library to help. It’s not perfect, but it can definitely help you figure out some options.

For example

I told it that I had zero experience and wanted to become an ethical hacker. It then recommended its fundamentals course, but also kept suggesting I should take some of its AWS Cloud labs assessments (Which is one of its top tier pricing features).

I kept telling it that I had no prior experience, but it still kept suggesting I should try some coding challenges, before finally narrowing down to beginner courses.

I then asked which courses I should take and in what order for me to get hired in this role, and it said I should search for roadmaps but didn’t provide any. (This may be because I couldn’t find a roadmap for this manually and so it didn’t have an option to link to).

So it's still ironing out some kinks but an interesting feature.

As for pricing, there are 3 options with discounts for paying for the year (or even 2 years) in advance:

The standard option gives you access to courses and certifications, while the premium model offers the same, but also includes projects and career/skill paths. I would argue that to fully learn, you should be working on projects that are aligned with your course.

Pros

• Fairly cheap

• Huge volume of content. Some super niche which can be very helpful

• AI search is pretty handy

• New courses made regularly

• Built in assessments to test your knowledge and retention

Cons

• No singular course purchase options or lifetime purchase options

• No refunds

• Courses are text based only (no videos)

• Price gating projects and skill paths isn’t great. As we’ve said before, you need these to both learn and follow a structured path to success

• The community option isn’t really a community as such. Its crowdsourced blog posts that answer common questions that you can search through. Once you write an article, you can be invited to a contributor-only Slack channel

EggHead

With a focus on full-stack programming training for Web Developers, and over 250+ courses, Egghead is a great training platform.

Their pricing model is also nice and simple at either $25 a month, $70 for 3 months, or $150 for the year. Better still, each price point gives access to all the same features.

They also have a lot of small, niche lessons around specific trending tasks which is very helpful.

Pros

• Some free courses

• Low price recurring membership

• Wide range of full-stack courses across multiple languages and frameworks

Cons

• Web dev focused. (So no cyber security training etc, although there are some smaller courses around security issues)

• No community, but you can leave comments on each course video and ask questions

• No career roadmaps or skill paths

• No advice for getting hired

• No lifetime purchase option (not a huge deal but worth mentioning)

FreeCodeCamp

FreeCodeCamp is an open source, non-profit project, with courses covering a HUGE range of topics. That means it's 100% free, and my choice for the best free learning option.

They have an active community, great blog content and more! It sounds too good to be true right? So let’s weigh up any pros and cons.

Pros

• It’s free

• A large array of courses covering Web Design, Algorithms and Data Structures, Full-stack development, Machine Learning and more

• An active and helpful community

• Over 9,000 tutorials (varying between actual courses, blog posts and Youtube videos)

Cons

• Free isn’t always a good thing

The problem with something being free, is there’s no pain point of inaction.

It’s kind of like the difference between getting a gym membership, or having weights at home that a friend gave to you. You can be super motivated and start lifting exercising in your garage, but unless you’re super strict-it can be easy to start forgetting those weights exist.

But because the gym costs you money, you’re more likely to go. 

Add in the fact that everyone else there is motivated and you’re more going to push yourself harder and achieve your results instead of doing small bits now and then.

Don’t get me wrong - free is awesome, just as long as you can push yourself to use it and see it through. Our lead instructor was entirely self taught with free materials and taught himself to code in a few months.

Frontend Masters

Frontend Masters are my top pick for if you already can code, and are looking to upskill into a more senior dev role, as that's a large part of their curriculum.

Their main focus, as you might have guessed, is on front-end development, but they do offer some full-stack and back-end training courses to supplement this, along with beginner courses to help you get started.

As for pricing, it's fairly simple at either $39 a month, or $390 a year.

Pros

• A lot of fantastic content

• Great pricing

• Set career and skill paths

• Private community

• Good for people wanting to move into more senior roles

Cons

• Front end focused so it’s missing a few topics you might find elsewhere i.e. they teach app security but not a cyber security roadmap

PluralSight

Pluralsight is a huge platform with over 6,500 tech courses! Obviously this means you’re going to find pretty much anything you want.

As for the pricing, it’s a little complicated. Basically you have 3 tiers (with further discounts if you pay for a year in advance):

• Core tech is $30 a month and gives you access to 3,900 courses (of the 6,500 total)

• Then you have specializations at $35 a month (which also includes the core tech training). So if you want to learn AI, data, cyber security or Cloud then you need to be on this price point. That being said, I’m fairly certain you only have access to the one you choose + the core lessons

• Finally, you have the ‘complete’ tier, which is access to every course at $55 a month

Honestly, it would probably be easier for them to just offer the $55 a month as the single price point and then an annual discount.

Pros

• Fairly cheap, even at premium membership

• High quality content

• High level teachers and expertise

• They do cover technical interviews and getting hired

Cons

• A HUGE volume of course can be overwhelming. For instance, although they cover tech interviews and how to get hired, which is fantastic news, they also have 6 different courses on the topic! If you think that’s a lot of options, their Python training is over 30+ courses! (Not lessons, but complete courses)

• No dedicated community, but they do have a questions section via Disqus on each course

• That pricing is overly complex

• No lifetime deal

Zero To Mastery 

ZTM is my #1 recommendation if you’re looking to learn to code and get hired asap. That being said, we are ZTM so I can understand how you might think we’re slightly biased, but let me break down why I think we deserve this.

If we start with our pricing, as we have 4 options:

• You can purchase courses individually, starting at around $199 for indepth courses

• Then we have our monthly membership at only $49 a month

• Or you can join for the year at $299 and save 49% 

• And then also have a one-time purchase offer for $1,299 that gives you access to all courses now and in the future.

That alone is better than most platforms, but we take it one step further by offering a unique lifetime challenge.

Basically, if you login and complete 1 lesson per month, for 30 months straight - you no longer have to pay for us and get lifetime access.

Pretty cool right? 

This way we know you’ll follow through and complete lessons and get hired. Because that’s the other thing about us, in that we want to take you from absolute zero experience to getting hired as soon as possible. 

This is why each course that we teach is picked based on student requests and potential in the marketplace. i.e. training for languages that people are actively hiring for, have a future, and will get you paid well.  

It’s also why we don’t have a huge volume of courses like some sites, because it’s pointless teaching random dead languages that no one is hiring for. Sure, we want you to learn to code and all that cool stuff, but more importantly, we want you to get paid for it ASAP!

Because of this focus, we cut out any excess information from our courses that can waste your time. Instead, we teach you everything you need to do the job with confidence. 

No joke but we’ve had people hired in 3-6 months, and going from waiters to 6 figure tech salaries.

How do we know what to cut and what to keep?

Simple! 

Our instructors work in the industries that they teach, so their courses are designed to take someone with no skill and turn them into the perfect employee that they want to hire.

This is why employers are often amazed at the portfolios that our students share during interviews, and some of them even start training up the team they just joined!

Not only that but every single course is updated each year, or when a major change has occurred in the industry. So you can be confident that you’re always getting up to date information.

It doesn’t end there though!

A huge factor in being able to stick at a goal and learn something new is being able to get support and have people around you. Which is why we have an incredibly active and supporting community, with a private Discord server with over 500,000 members.

That server is then broken down by topics and careers so you can ask specific questions, and get replies from your instructors, fellow students, and other working tech professionals.

We also run live events, cohort sprints, private AMA calls and more. All the benefits of boot camps or in person events, without the price tag!

TL;DR

If you want to get a job in tech asap, then we believe we have everything in place to help you get there fast, which is why we’ve had students hired at Amazon, Tesla, Google, Oracle and many, many more - some as their very first tech job!

Check out some of their stories here, and more testimonials here.

Pros

• Low price

• One-off purchase offer

• Lifetime free access on completing the lifetime challenge

• Designed to help you get hired asap from zero prior experience

• Thriving community

• Frequently updated

Cons

• We don’t offer a free plan, although we have released some introductory courses over on our YouTube channel

For example

Here’s the first 8 hours of our complete Python developer course:

This way you get an idea for our courses and can get started for free!

So which will you choose?

Hopefully this guide has helped you clear up some questions you might have about the best Codeacademy alternatives right now.

Although there are 7 options on this list, these 3 are my best choice depending on your situation:

• ⭐ Best free platform: FreeCodeCamp

• ⭐ Best for beginners that want to get hired ASAP: Zero To Mastery

• ⭐ Best for upskilling: Frontend Masters

Don’t just take my word for it though. Check out each option and give them a trial and see which you prefer. The key thing really is to just make sure you take action and choose today so that you can get started on that new job and skill. 

You’ll be amazed at how fast your life can change once you join any of these platforms.