Treehouse vs. Udemy: Which is Better For Learning How to Code?

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Team Treehouse and Udemy are two of the most popular platforms out there for learning to code. But if you’re waffling between which you should use to start your journey, it helps to start with a foundation of Udemy vs. Team Treehouse pros and cons.

In today’s guest post, Lee Hughes outlines his comparison between the Team Treehouse and Udemy learning platforms. He’s used both platforms and evaluates the key things that stood out to him while taking Udemy and Treehouse coding courses.

Take it away, Lee!

Disclosure: I’m a proud Udemy affiliate. If you buy a Udemy course through my links on this page, I may get a small commission for referring you. Thanks!

The last few years have seen a huge increase in people wanting to teach themselves to code. As you can view below in Google Trends data, it really took off around 2012.

Google Trends data for "learn to code"

One of the reasons for this boom can be summarized by a quote from Carl Sagan:

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

Everyone can agree that our lives are increasingly dependent on technology. With the boom of the Internet and its growth, we now have a shortage of talented technical people. This, among other things, has led to the learn to code movement. In an attempt to fill this gap, a series of startups sprung up such as Code School, Team Treehouse, Udemy, and many university websites.

In this post I’ll look at Team Treehouse and Udemy specifically, comparing the two on their strengths and weaknesses.

Please note that pricing listed below may change in the future!

Team Treehouse vs. Udemy 

I’ll start by giving a brief individual Treehouse review and Udemy review where I go over my favorite things about my experiences with each platform.

🌲 Team Treehouse Learning Review 🌲

I’ve been a Treehouse Pro/gold member for about two years now. I have enjoyed watching Treehouse develop into one of the leading websites where people can learn to code. (For a more in-depth review of Team Treehouse, see my analysis here.)

Treehouse for Coding 

With over 1,000 hours of high-quality videos, Treehouse is a great investment for those wanting to learn how to code without any prior experience. Treehouse code videos are designed to take you from knowing nothing about code to getting yourself a job in the tech industry. And users are doing just this, with a growing list of people using Treehouse to start a new career in tech.

Many of the Treehouse programming courses have been made for beginners. Treehouse is also starting to release more intermediate coding courses, which is great because it allows you to progress past a beginner level.

Treehouse Pricing

Pricing with Treehouse starts at $25 per month and you have access to +1,000 videos with the tracks. With enough time, you can easily get through a couple of tracks in a month. Then you’ll have a good foundation to start learning more advanced features.

Favorite Treehouse Feature: Tracks

One of the reasons I rate Treehouse so highly is because of their tracks feature. Learning to program and build websites can often be a daunting task. With so much information on the web, it’s easy to get analysis paralysis and not really progress with your learning.

Treehouse solved this problem by creating tracks that act as a roadmap so you know what to learn next. The following track is for Rails development. As you can see below, it starts off simple by teaching HTML and CSS3. It then progresses further with other languages and skills you’ll need to know to become a full-fledged Rails developer.

Treehouse: Rails Development Track
Treehouse: Tracks
Treehouse: Ruby on Rails

At the time of writing, Team Treehouse have about 47 tracks, some of which will take a few hours to get through, some of which will take a good few weeks.

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💥 Udemy Learning Platform Review 💥

Udemy has also appeared in the online education boom. While Udemy offers a lot of non-coding topics, there are a good number of courses you can take to learn how to code. (Oftentimes at a good price, too.)

Udemy Coding Courses

One of the reasons I love Udemy is because it offers you the chance to drill down on a certain aspect of coding. For example, a popular course Coding for Entrepreneurs has similar courses which you can use to build your own Geolocator app or a daily deals website. Depending on what you want to learn, Udemy might have some courses tailored specifically to those needs.

Udemy courses can be created by anyone who wants to make them. This can have advantages and disadvantages, as a teacher’s style when learning online is very important. If you search through the Udemy courses, you’ll see a mix of teachers on the same subject.

Some teach quite slow, while other teachers go very fast and fly through the content, making you pause the video often and having to review each step. 

The content of the courses also depends on the teacher and their preferred method of teaching. Most will just talk over their code while some will include PowerPoint slides.

While they do have a large amount of beginner lessons for certain languages, Udemy also offers plenty of choices for students to learn intermediate to advanced subjects.

Udemy Pricing

With Udemy, you have to pay one time for each class. Courses are all different prices but you’ll expect to pay around $60-$120 for a good in-depth course. 

There are also courses for free if you search for them, and Udemy often has sales that drop the price of many courses to $10-$20. There are coupons for Udemy, too, that can drastically reduce the cost of the courses. To get some discounts on Udemy, see my review here, where I add coupons when they are available. (There are other websites like StackSocial that sometimes promote Udemy bundles.) 

Udemy Interface

If you decide to sign up with Udemy, you’ll see something like this. Your course will be listed on the right with a progression feature. On the left you’ll have access to take notes on each topic or ask the teacher a question.

Udemy

Teachers are pretty good at responding and you can see other student’s questions as well.

📝 Pros and Cons of Team Treehouse vs. Udemy 📝

Treehouse Pros

  • Affordable
  • Great community
  • New courses come out frequently
  • Learning roadmaps
  • Wide range of computer languages and skills to choose from

Treehouse Cons

  • Still requires additional work outside of Treehouse for more advanced learning
  • Quizzes are too easy

Udemy Pros

  • Has more options to learn a specific niche skill e.g. coding a daily deals website
  • More advanced courses
  • Coupons can get you great deals on courses
  • Easy to follow videos

Udemy Cons

  • Lack of community support during your coding journey
  • Can get expensive if buying multiple courses
  • Instructors, teaching styles, and quality can vary

🙌 My Final Preference on Team Treehouse vs. Udemy 🙌

In the end, my personal preference is Team Treehouse because I think you get more value based on the pricing structure compared to Udemy. 

Overall, both Treehouse and Udemy have their pros and cons. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve. In certain instances, one might be more suited to your needs than the other. Either way, it’s fantastic that we have these websites at our disposal.

Have you taken courses with both Treehouse and Udemy? If yes, which do you prefer? Let us know in the comments!

About Lee Hughes

Lee Hughes

Lee Hughes is the creator of wpreviews.net. You can find him over on Twitter @leehughes21.

When he’s not working on websites, he is pondering the singularity and its implications.