The Team Treehouse coding platform uses video courses along with a browser-based code editor to teach students how to code. Their editor allows you to see the results of code in real-time as well as participate in interactive exercises.
In this Team Treehouse review, we’ll cover some key things to know about coding on Treehouse, including Treehouse pricing, features of the platform, ease of use, content quality, the Treehouse Techdegree, and some recommended Team Treehouse courses.
Disclosure: I’m a proud affiliate for some of the resources mentioned in this article. If you buy a product through my links on this page, I may get a small commission for referring you. Thanks!
Table of Contents
- What is Treehouse?
- TL;DR
- Topics
- Pricing
- Features
- Ease of Use
- Content Quality
- Top Treehouse Course Recommendations
- What Past Students Think
- Treehouse Alternatives
- Final Thoughts
What is Treehouse?
Treehouse, which you may also know by the name Team Treehouse, features a variety of coding education resources.
Treehouse learning content is divided into three basic types:
- On-demand, expert-led video courses for the most in-demand careers in tech, with quizzes and code challenges to keep you engaged
- Tracks are guided curricula, composed of courses that teach you a particular set of skills
- Techdegree programs are Treehouse’s version of online bootcamps, covering a full curriculum of interactive course videos, workshops, quizzes, code challenges, coding peer reviews, Treehouse Slack community access, and hands-on projects. There are currently four Techdegrees to choose from: Front End Web Development, Full Stack JavaScript, UX Design, and Python Development.
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Team Treehouse Review: the TL;DR
Before we take a deeper dive into this Treehouse review, here’s the quick list of Treehouse learning pros and cons if you’re short on time!
Pros of Learning With Team Treehouse:
- Treehouse has a diverse library of training with coding topics such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, iOS development, Android development and JavaScript. There’s also content on web design, business, marketing, Photoshop and much more.
- Content meets a high standard of quality because it’s all crafted by a team of in-house expert teachers.
- Treehouse takes a project-based approach, helping you learn the practical skills you need to create real products like websites, web apps, and mobile apps.
- Treehouse goes the extra mile to help you start a career or business. A section of the library is dedicated to this very area, with courses on how to establish a business and how to start a coding career.
Cons of Learning With Team Treehouse:
- Treehouse’s training is primarily based on videos, so it might not be ideal for people with other learning styles.
- No lifetime access: If you stop paying, you lose access to courses.
- There are no student reviews/ratings you can read through before taking a course.
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Topics Taught on Team Treehouse
Treehouse offers courses on tech and tech-adjacent subjects (e.g. design, business) across 24 different topics 👇
- HTML/CSS
- Design
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- PHP
- WordPress
- iOS
- Android Development Tools
- Business
- Python
- Java
- Digital Literacy
- APIs
- C#
- Data Analysis
- Databases
- Go
- Machine Learning
- Quality Assurance
- Security
- Computer science
- Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
- 21st century skills (e.g. interviewing, overcoming imposter syndrome)
- Learning resources (e.g. learning techniques)
How Much Does Treehouse Coding Cost?
Please note that pricing listed below may change in the future!
💰 There are three Team Treehouse pricing options:
- $25/month for the basic plan.
- $49/month for the pro plan, which comes with access to more material, such as lectures from industry leaders, bonus workshops, and the option to download course videos for offline learning.
- $199/month for the Techdegree, which comes with everything from the basic and pro plans, plus personalized feedback on your code, real-time support from Treehouse staff, and a community of Techdegree students on Slack.
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Features of the Team Treehouse Platform
Here are some of the notable perks of Treehouse learning. Some are available to all Treehouse course students, while other features are limited to certain plans like Treehouse Techdegree enrollees or pro users.
📝 Highly interactive: workshops, quizzes, practice sessions, and code challenges regularly follow each lesson in a course
📊 Leaderboard: “Students earn points and badges of completion as they finish courses, which are showcased in their user profile that’s visible to fellow students, talent recruiters, proud parents, etc.”
🙌 7-day free trial to try out the platform and its courses
💌 Help shape future decisions: Team Treehouse reviews all emails and makes note each month of what students are wanting to see. This helps shape decisions about content and features in the near future.
⏩ Lecture control: You have the option to play lectures at different speeds (. 5x, 1x, 1.1x, 1.25x, 1.5x or 2x).
✏️ Auto-generated captions: Available in English. There are also transcripts you can read.
💵 You can pay with PayPal.
💬 Exclusive industry workshops and interviews (access for pro plan users)
💾 Option to download videos for offline viewing (for pro plan users)
🔑 Beta access to Treehouse’s newest innovations in online training (for pro plan users)
💬 Exclusive Slack community. Join hundreds of thousands of students in our supportive online community. (for Techdegree users)
💻 Weekly office hours for live support and in-depth code reviews (for Techdegree users)
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Treehouse Ease of Use
To be honest, the Team Treehouse layout isn’t my favorite for a few reasons.
When you visit the homepage (at the time of writing), there’s no way to directly access the course library to look at what they offer. The homepage is mostly aimed toward getting users to sign up for a free trial or enroll in the Techdegree. However, you can find the course library here, or by googling “Team Treehouse courses.”
Once you’re in the course library, you can search for courses by category or topic, or sort by Newest, Oldest, Alphabetical, and Difficulty. However, there isn’t a way to sort by popularity, as the individual courses don’t have a rating/review system built in.
Another thing to note is that the thumbnails for each course are all the same within the library. There are no images or design elements to distinguish them easily, and it’s hard to tell what the content will be like unless you click on each individual course. All you see from the library is the course title, a partial description, and a few tags indicating topic and difficulty.
🔎 You can also search through Tracks, which are curated collections of courses that come together to teach one topic in depth. You can only browse through tracks by topic (can’t search with a browser) and can only see the three Most Popular at the top of the page.
To start learning, all you have to do is click “Free trial” in the upper right hand side, choose your plan, enter some basic information, give payment details, and start going through the courses.
Overall, my Team Treehouse review gets a little ding for not having the most intuitive interface, but it’s not a deal breaker.
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Team Treehouse Content Quality
From a technical standpoint, Treehouse content mostly comes in the form of professional videos. They look like something you’d see on a high-quality YouTube channel, with great lighting, camera, audio, positioning, etc. You won’t see many PowerPoint slides like on many other online course providers.
As far as the quality of the instructional content goes, Treehouse generally does an amazing job. Not just anyone can create a course on the platform. All of the instructors work in-house for Treehouse and are experts in their field—and it shows in the quality of the videos and lessons.
That said, since you can’t read through Treehouse reviews and ratings from students who’ve taken courses on Team Treehouse (like you can with other course providers), it can be a little trickier to find the right course to take. It helps if you look up the instructor online to get a better feel for their credentials, and look through the course curriculum to see what they’ll be teaching before you dive in.
There’s also just the traditional “trial and error” strategy, which is easy to do with Treehouse learning. Since Team Treehouse pricing is based on a monthly subscription model, you’re paying a flat fee for full access. That means you really have nothing to lose by browsing through some courses, viewing a few of the lecture videos (or watching the course trailer), and seeing if it’s what you’re looking for before spending more time on it. You can always move onto the next course if it isn’t the right fit.
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My Top Team Treehouse Course Recommendations
If this Team Treehouse review is sounding good to you so far, you might be wondering about specific Treehouse courses to explore. Here are some of my favorite options on Team Treehouse!
1. Front End Web Development Track
I often recommend that new coders start with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are the three languages the web is built on, and are also beginner-friendly. This Treehouse course teaches you the fundamentals of all three, plus other useful front-end developer info like optimization and debugging.
2. Full Stack JavaScript Track
To take your JavaScript knowledge another level up, you’ll learn how to create interactive browser elements. The course also covers the Node.js platform for writing JS applications.
3. GitHub Basics
GitHub is a tool beloved by professional programmers everywhere for its collaboration support and community. Learn how to contribute to open source projects, show off your projects, and work with other coders on GitHub.
4. Web Design Track
Websites don’t just need to be usable—they should have visual appeal too. This course teaches you design principles like color theory, branding, and typography, as well as technical topics like how to build a site prototype and create vector graphics.
5. Techdegree
Treehouse offers a variety of more structured and intensive Techdegree programs designed to prepare you for a career in an area of your choice. At time of writing, there are pathways for front-end web development, full-stack JavaScript, UX design, and Python.
Techdegrees take 2-4 months to complete, and you’ll build 8-12 projects which you can later add to your portfolio. Your work is graded by industry professionals and you’ll have support from instructors and fellow students. While I won’t get into a full Treehouse Techdegree review right now, I do think they’re a great option and definitely affordable compared to a lot of bootcamp-style programs!
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What Past Students Think
Greg Thomas
Likes:
The video lessons are high quality, informative, and short enough to keep the students interested. There are tons of topics and paths to follow, which allows students to really specialize in all aspects of web development and design. One of my favorite parts is the points system which allows students to earn points and it shows how many points you have earned in each language.
And of course, we can’t forget the milestones where we see bits and pieces of a super-dramatic movie they filmed. The movie is hilarious and it really made me want to keep learning code so I could see what happens next.
Dislikes:
For beginners, some of the starter projects were kind of intense. This leads to a couple instances of, “Don’t worry about this right now; we’ll get to that later.”
Recommended for:
I recommend Team Treehouse to everyone who wants to know more about code. There are constantly updates being added to the site, so there is always going to be something they can teach you. Team Treehouse is a fantastic resource and I think everyone should give it a chance.
Trevor Waddell
Likes:
The main thing that I like about Treehouse is the instructor-led content. For the most part, the instructors seem pretty knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the topics/courses they teach. On top of that, Treehouse stays up to date with the courses they offer.
Dislikes:
Sometimes, the code challenges offered during a course aren’t very challenging. For example, they’ll ask you to code something that you just watched the instructor code, even in some of the advanced courses. Additionally, the quiz questions can be really vague.
Recommended for:
I would recommend Treehouse to anyone interested in coding, from beginners to experienced. Treehouse offers courses for beginners and those with intermediate to advanced skills. If you’re just starting out or want to get familiar with a new language, Treehouse has something for you.
Lori Smith
I tried several online coding resources before coming to Treehouse: Codecademy, Code Avengers, Women’s Coding Collective (WCC) and the Stanford and MIT Youtube CS courses. While all of them were good options for different reasons, Treehouse quickly became my favorite.
Likes:
- The Tracks on Treehouse are logically laid out and allow you to choose the direction you think you will be heading.
- The courses are project-oriented so you end up with something you created, often a couple of projects.
- As opposed to LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda) and Udemy, all of the instructors work for Treehouse and are experts in the field. These aren’t courses submitted by random “experts” who may or may not know the subject area and may not be good instructors. As a former teacher, I can tell that the instructors are coached on how to teach, not just plopped in front of a camera.
- The instructors are very personable and approachable, responding to questions and requests in a timely manner.
- There are coding challenges and quizzes after each segment of instruction.
- All of the code from each course is available in a zip file for later use.
- I love using Workspaces for real-time review of the coding you’ve just done. I use Brackets and it is very similar to Workspaces so I didn’t feel like I was learning a new text editor.
- The community on Treehouse is amazing! They will not only help you with questions regarding Treehouse classes but general coding and development questions, as well. I’ve never felt the cyber eye-rolling at newbie questions. You also have the opportunity to try your hand at answering other people’s questions, which is a great way to test your knowledge.
- The price. I barely feel the $25/month and even if I’m not actively studying a track, it’s worth keeping the membership to use as a resource for questions.
- The point system is encouraging. It’s nice to see your number climb as you complete courses.
Dislikes:
- Although they do have a library of short tutorials, workshops and enhancements, it’s still growing and there are some gaps.
- I like the self-paced nature of the course but sometimes I yearn for a bit more accountability. Treehouse does send out automated emails telling you what they think you should complete for the day but that’s about it.
- If you have some experience/training, the videos may seem a little slow paced. I have found it helpful when I’m reviewing a segment I’ve already completed to just up the speed.
Recommended for:
I can’t think of anyone interested in online learning that I would not recommend to Team Treehouse.
The video-based instruction and strong community support make it great for beginners who may want to take things a bit slower. More advanced students or seasoned coders who are looking to study an additional language or refresh prior learning will also find relevant material, since there are currently 101 workshops in addition to the courses that go beyond the learning tracks. And an added feature for Pro members is the conference section, which houses talks from influential leaders in technology.
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Treehouse Alternatives
If what you’ve been reading in the Treehouse review doesn’t sound like the platform is a fit for you, here are some other coding course platforms to explore instead!
Udemy: Courses can be taught by anyone, so you have to pay attention to reviews and do external research before you make a purchase. Unlike Treehouse, Udemy is not a subscription-based platform; you have to buy courses individually but that means you have lifetime access. $20-50 per course (some $100+). Read my full review here.
Skillshare: Covers lots of different topics, not just tech. Unlike Treehouse, courses can be created by anyone — although there are some courses produced in-house. Cheaper than Treehouse. $19/month or $99/year. Read my full review here.
LinkedIn Learning: Offers 16,000+ courses on tech, business, and creative topics. Also comes with access to LinkedIn Premium, which unlocks tools to help you find a job. Around the same pricing as Treehouse at $29.99/month or $239.88/year. Read my full review here.
Codecademy: Less video-based than Treehouse; courses on Codecademy are mostly text-based with written instructions that guide you through writing code in a text editor. Their paid Pro plan is more expensive than Treehouse at $39.99/month or $239.88/year, although there is a free plan available. Read my full review here.
Coursera: Its 3,000+ courses are taught by professors at top universities like Yale and Stanford and are more academic in nature. Offers online degrees, specializations, and accredited certifications. A bit more expensive than Treehouse at around $39-$79 per month. Read my full review here.
Pluralsight: Like Treehouse, Pluralsight courses only cover tech and related topics. It may be a better option for intermediate and advanced learners, and those pursuing professional certs (e.g.,CompTIA, ITIL®). Around the same price as Treehouse at $29/month or $299.00/year. Read my full review here.
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Final Thoughts: Is Team Treehouse Worth It?
In the end, Team Treehouse can be useful for just about everyone, regardless of skill level. With a diverse library of high-quality courses taught by professionals from the field, you know you’re learning from some of the best instructors.
🌟 Check out Team Treehouse here and try out a free trial to see if the platform is a good fit for you!