When comparing edX vs Udemy, the Slant community recommends edX for most people. In the question“What are the best websites to learn to code?” edX is ranked 4th while Udemy is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose edX is:
Both edX and the classes are free.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
Both edX and the classes are free.
Pro Offers courses from well known schools
edX offers courses from a wide range of well known colleges and universities including Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell and more.
Pro Large selection of science courses
edX offers a wide variety of science-related courses. This makes it a great resource for learning not only specific programming languages, but also other topics relating to computer science.
Pro A lot of topics (subjects)
Topics include biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, electronics, engineering, food and nutrition, history, humanities, law, literature, math, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, science, statistics and more.
Pro Offer certificates for some courses
Pro Wide range of courses
If one course doesn't meet your needs, there is a sea of other courses to choose from.
Pro Value for money
A +10 hour high quality course for under $20 is great value.
Pro Regular discounts
Often run discounts 50 - 90% off resulting in sub $20 courses.
Pro Offers intermediate and advanced courses
Udemy offers plenty of courses for beginner programmers, but also has a large variety of more advanced courses to choose from.
Pro Some courses are free
Pro Courses available in over 80 languages
Pro Friendly community
Both on site and on various social networks Udemy aims to create a community of friendly people that can help each other out.
Pro Quality of top courses
The quality of top courses (+4.0 rating & high enrollment) is exceptional.
Cons
Con Lack of engagement in the forums
edX does not have the same forum participation from both students and instructors that other websites do, and the form of engagement often does not encourage discussion.
Con Courses aren't always available
While edX does offer some self-paced courses, you may end up waiting for the course of your choice to be run.
Con The forums are difficult to navigate
The forums are difficult to sort by date and topic, and are unintuitive to navigate.
Con Quality varies
The quality control for the content offered is fairly limited. As there are so many different instructors offering courses on Udemy, many of which lack formal training and teaching experience since anyone can be a teacher on Udemy, the quality varies quite a bit between the different courses.
Con Most courses are expensive
While Udemy does offer free courses, most of them are around $100.
Con Difficult to take multiple (10+) courses at the same time
The system becomes messy and hard to follow if you plan on using the site to learn more than a handful of things at once.