Best Skillshare Alternatives in 2025

Skillshare is a great platform for all things creative.

It also has a heap of coding courses on there, all for the annual price of $168 a year.

The problem though is that it’s not a dedicated coding platform. Course content can be hit and miss, and it lacks any kind of community or support. 

So if you want to learn to code and get hired, you’re better off looking at some more coding-specific options. 

Which is why in this guide, I’ve gone ahead and broken down the top 8 coding platforms that I think are the best to learn from that are similar to Skillshare in terms of price point and quality. (Although most of them offer monthly costs, so you’re not stuck with the annual fee right away!)

Better still, I’ve also weighed up the pros and cons of each platform, as well as listed their key features, so you can decide the best option for you.

Grab a coffee and let’s dive in…

Mile-High Overview

Before we get into each course platform, here’s a quick comparison table for the skimmers in the audience:

With that out of the way, let’s get into each review and go through them alphabetically.

Codecademy

Trustpilot score: 2.7/5

Codecademy offers both free and paid courses, all focused on specific areas of programming such as Front-End, Back-End, Machine Learning, and more.

They’ve been around for over a decade and have helped literally millions of people get their start in tech. Because of this, their course catalog is currently sitting at 776 courses!

If there’s something in tech you want to learn, chances are they have a course on it, either as an introduction or a deeper dive.

Pricing

As for pricing, they have a number of options.

• They have student rates

• Team rates designed for companies to skill up

• Single use pricing that can vary depending on tiered access. This will also vary depending on if you pay monthly or pay for the year in advance

I’m going to guess that you’re probably the single user rate so let’s break that down:

There are 3 tiers of access, with different courses and features available.

Free tier

The free level is obviously $0 and gives access to some of their course catalog, some projects, and access to their community.

However, you don’t get access to their information on how to get hired, and you lose out on some other features and more in-depth support.

Not bad for getting started at all!

Plus tier

The plus level is billed at $29.99 a month, or $14.99 a month if you pay for the year in advance.

This gives you everything from the free tier, as well as access to the pay-walled courses, and roadmaps of what to learn to get X role, certificates, and more responsive support. You still don’t get access to the content on how to get hired.

Pro tier

The Pro level is $39.99 a month or $19.99 if you pay in advance. This then gives you access to all the career features.

Honestly, most people learn these skills so they can get a job, so I’m not sure why they lock these out.  

With that out of the way, let’s weigh this all up.

Pros

• Some free courses to help you get started

• Price is pretty good, even when paying monthly

• Active community support (if on a paid plan) but still some community

• Programming focused content

• Skill paths and career paths to help you not just learn but also get hired

Cons

• Skill paths and projects are only available when you become a paid member. This is an issue as actively building projects not only helps you to learn more easily and more effectively, but it also helps you stand out to prospective employers while getting hands-on experience. Ideally, you want courses that not only teach but also get you to build at the same time

• Career training for getting hired is only at the top-tier price point. It’s such a vital part of the process, it sucks to gate it like this

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

• Some students state that lessons can feel overly basic, asking you to just copy and paste code as a way of learning, so you don't get 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

• Even with the paid community options, students complain that it can take days to get feedback

Again though, I would take some of these negative comments with a pinch of salt and do your own research. 

It’s impossible to get millions of users and not have some unhappy people. Likewise, it can be hard to have community support and stay up to date when you have 700+ courses and so many students.

Code with Mosh

Trustpilot score: 4.7/5

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.

Also has the 2nd highest TrustPilot score in this list!

Pricing

As for pricing, he offers 2 options:

• You can either pay a one-off price for courses ,which can be anywhere from $50 to $400 dollars each

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

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

• No entry level pricing option (Although you do own the course so no ongoing fees)

Educative

Trustpilot score: 3.9/5

Educative is another great option with entirely tech-focused courses, and a built-in code editor inside the browser to help you code along with the course. (In fairness, you can just open an IDE and do this with any other platform, but it’s a cool feature!).

Their course selection is the 2nd largest on this list with over 500 combined courses and projects. Some are in-depth beginner to mastery courses, while others are short 1-2 hr courses covering a specific feature or problem.

Pricing

As for pricing, membership starts at $59 a month, going down to $16.66 on a monthly ‘standard’ membership, when you pay annually, or $24.99 a month for the premium option, again, when paid annually 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.

Pros

• Fairly cheap

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

• New courses made regularly

• Built in assessments to test your knowledge and retention

Cons

• Courses are text based vs 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

EggHead

Trustpilot score: 0/5 (No reviews on the platform)

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

Pricing

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 cybersecurity 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

Trustpilot score: 3.2/5

FreeCodeCamp is an open-source, non-profit project with courses covering a HUGE range of topics.

Pricing

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 that 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 and 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

Trustpilot score: 2.5/5

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.

Pricing

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

Trustpilot score: 1.4/5

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

Like with most platforms like this, you have some core 10-hour+ courses and then a large number of 1-2 hour mini courses on niche topics.

The core courses are up to date, but I did see some others that were last updated in 2020.

Pricing

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 

Trustpilot score: 4.9/5

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 (along with a few customer reviews).

You can check out all 500+ reviews (with 94% 5 star rating) here.

For now though, let's break down what I think are our biggest benefits, starting with our pricing.

Pricing

As you can see, 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.

It’s not a cost but a 100% discount.

Here's how it works:

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

We even gamify it to help you stay on track:

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.

Simply click across to any course to see when it was last updated:

Beginner

Prompt Engineering Bootcamp (Working With LLMs): Zero to Mastery

27 Hours •255 Lessons

Stop memorizing random prompts. Instead, learn how Large Language Models (LLMs) actually work and how to use them effectively. This course will take you from being a complete beginner to the forefront of the AI world.

Scott Kerr

It doesn’t end there, though!

A huge factor in being able to stick to a goal and learn something new is being able to get support and have people around you. This is why we have an incredibly active and supportive 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 with 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 of 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 Skillshare alternatives if you want to learn to code.

Although there are 8 options on this list, these 3 are my best choice depending on your situation:

• ⭐ Best free platform: FreeCodeCamp

• ⭐ Best for beginners who 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.

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