Udemy Review: Is This the Best Online Learning Platform for You?

Below, we’ve put together a list of the advantages and disadvantages of Udemy as mentioned by active and former customers.

Additionally, you can also find reviews and ratings for all the courses on their individual course pages.

However, these ratings and reviews can be somewhat misleading.

Many Udemy users have complained about purchasing a “what should’ve been great” course but ending up being disappointed.

To avoid further disappointment, Udemy provides a 30-day money-back guarantee, but as a result of bad customer support, a refund can take months to be paid and sometimes not arrive at all.

Things aren’t looking too great for Udemy at the moment.

So, let’s move on and take a more in-depth look at what they have to offer.

With so many courses available on Udemy, it’s almost impossible to not find something you might be interested in.

Currently, the platform has 13 main categories with a bunch of sub-categories, all containing hundreds of thousands of different courses to enroll in.

Let’s take a look at what Udemy offers to each specific group and how these groups experience the platform.

If you’re looking to join Udemy as a student, the first thing you’ll need to do is create your Udemy account.

It’s a pretty simple and straightforward process. Visit Udemy’s website, click "Sign Up," fill in the details, and voilà — you have yourself an account.

Best of all: The sign-up is completely free!

Once you have your account set up, you can immediately start browsing through all the courses.

Pro tip: Search through categories rather than typing a keyword into the search bar.

This will narrow down your search results and help you find more specific courses.

Just to give you an idea of the volume of courses on Udemy: If you search for the keyword "dog", you’ll find over 800 courses.

That’s quite a few courses you’ll need to scroll through to ultimately find the one you’re looking for.

On the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see your course content.

On this sidebar, you can tick boxes to indicate the completion of a video, move on to the next section by clicking on it, and track your progress.

Once you’ve completed a course, you’ll receive a course completion certificate, which is available to download.

These certificates can be seen as bragging rights rather than an actual qualification, as Udemy isn’t accredited by any academic institution.

Note: Course completion certificates are only available with paid Udemy courses.

We already know that anybody can join the Udemy platform for free.

But how much do Udemy courses cost?

Generally, Udemy courses can cost anything between $99.99 and $199.99.

However, all of the Udemy courses are on sale at some point or another — and the sale prices are huge!

So, if you’re considering joining Udemy as a student, make sure to use sales to your advantage.

Next, we’ll be taking a look at Udemy Business and how employers and employees might benefit from taking Udemy’s courses.

Keeping the pros and cons in mind, let’s take a look at all the features Udemy Business has to offer and see whether they're worth it.

Udemy Business has a large library of features to make your and your team’s learning experience as smooth and pleasant as possible.

These features are:

With Udemy Business, you get access to more than 16k curated courses in 14 languages.

The platform offers something for every learning style, including smart tips, executive briefs, certification prep, and more.

Udemy Business courses are created specifically with personal and professional development in mind.

It provides you with courses that will keep your team members up-to-date with all their tech and soft skills.

For example:

All this while getting taught by top-quality Udemy instructors.

Of the thousands of instructors on Udemy, only a fraction are selected to teach their Udemy courses on Udemy Business.

Udemy has a specific method for choosing its business instructors.

They look at whether the instructor:

When these factors are taken into consideration, it’s expected that all Udemy Business instructors are up to standard and professional.

Udemy Business’ customization features let you and your team tailor learning to achieve your unique goals.

Some of these features include:

These features ensure that the Udemy courses you see are personalized for your needs.

Whether you need a course in manager training, career development, or maybe digital security, Udemy Business has it.

With Udemy Business, you can support your team in their native language.

It offers 4 powerful language features:

Further, Udemy Business provides for learning in 14 different languages.

Gain visibility into how your employees are learning and performing.

Udemy Business gives you comprehensive insights into learning activities, so you can track your employees’ progress, identify trends, and know when to take action.

Scale your team’s learning path to suit your needs with flexible controls that empower admins, protect user privacy, and get your team learning faster.

Achieve critical learning and business outcomes by assessing and guiding learners with Udemy Paths, assessments, workspaces, and labs.

Udemy Business Pro enables technical professionals to achieve their learning and business outcomes more effectively with training in information technology, development, and data & analytics.

Before you settle on Udemy Business based solely on its features, you need to ask yourself: How much does it cost?

If you have a team that has between 5 and 20 members, the Udemy Team subscription is the way to go.

With Team, you’ll get access to 7,300+ courses, analytics and adoption reports, and mobile app access (amongst other things).

This subscription plan will cost you $360 per user, per year, plus any applicable taxes.

The Udemy for Business Enterprise plan is mainly aimed at larger groups with 21 or more users.

With Enterprise, you get everything that’s included in the Teams subscription plus access to 16,000+ courses, custom topics, and the possibility to host proprietary courses and create user groups.

There’s no set price. So, to get a quote, contact the Udemy sales support team.

Udemy Business partnered with Corp U to create the Leadership Development Program.

These programs also don’t have a set price, and to get a quote you’ll have to contact the sales team.

Here, you’ll get access to 100+ executive-level courses from top universities and institutions, as well as the opportunity to attend live events and receive AI-powered analytics and insights.

In addition to studying Udemy’s courses, you can also become a Udemy instructor.

In a nutshell, is Udemy for instructors worth it or not?

Before we start looking at the features you’ll get when you become an instructor on Udemy, let’s take a look at the pros and cons that’ll accompany you on this journey.

Here are a few advantages and disadvantages to consider before you decide to become an instructor on Udemy:

With the right course creation tools, almost anybody can successfully create and sell an Udemy online course.

It just so happens that Udemy provides all the necessary tools for you to do just that:

Right from the start, Udemy guides you on how to create your Udemy courses.

First, it helps you plan your course by setting up a course description and structure and gives you some tips on how to start filming your course videos.

Once your planning is completed, it’s time to start creating your content.

Here, Udemy informs you of all the requirements that need to be complied with when using film and audio in your courses.

After reading through the tips and requirements, you can immediately start adding your course content.

Your course content can be in the form of a video, a video and slide mashup, or an article.

Additionally, you can choose to either add captions to your courses or not.

Finally, it’s time to publish your Udemy course.

In this step, you create your landing page, choose your course’s pricing, set up promotions or coupons, and write automated messages that will be sent to your students when they join or complete a course.

Udemy provides 4 features for you, as an instructor, to keep in contact with your students:

Udemy recommends that you use these channels to ensure a smooth student experience.

When you join Udemy as an instructor, Udemy provides you with a tool known as Marketplace Insights.

It’s instructor-exclusive and aims to help find a potential online course idea.

All of this information will help you create a better course and become a successful instructor on Udemy.

With Udemy’s test video tool, you can submit a 2-minute test video for the Udemy tech team to review and provide feedback on your audio, video, and delivery.

The coupon creation tool allows you to create multiple coupons within the current calendar month through CSV upload.

Furthermore, Udemy provides 3 other useful resources for instructors:

The amount of money you make will depend on how students find your course.

Now, we’ve got some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is that if you make a sale where no instructor coupon or course referral link was used, you will only receive 37% of the revenue for any Udemy sales.

The good news is that creating and hosting your course on Udemy is absolutely free of charge, and you can publish as many paid and free courses as you like.

Here are some ways students can find your course:

When it comes to affordability, systeme.io is the best option to create and sell courses.

In fact, you can even create your first course for free!

Our lifetime Free plan gives you access to all of our core features (except webinars).

Once you’re ready to create more courses and grow your online business, systeme.io has you covered.

You can easily upgrade your plan to one of our paid plans (if you pay annually, you get a 30% discount).

Now, let’s answer the question you’ve all been waiting for.

Here’s a quick overview of what Udemy offers:

In this Udemy review, we went into great length on the functionality of the platform as well as the pros and cons of using it for creating, selling, and taking courses.

So, is Udemy worth it or not?

If you’re simply looking to learn a new hobby or improve your skill set, Udemy could just be the online learning platform for you.

Selling courses on Udemy can also be a good idea if you're trying out the waters as a course creator or hoping to gather some early feedback.

But if you want to build a reliable, long-lasting online course business, you need both an audience and a brand.

In this case, you should establish your online school and work toward that objective.

With an all-in-one online course platform, like systeme.io, you’ll achieve just that, and so much more — get your free account and give our platform a go today!