LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Which One is Better? (2022) (2024)

As the world is becoming increasingly digital, especially amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are looking for online courses to develop new skills and enhance existing ones.

However, this also means that more online learning platforms are emerging on the market, and choosing the right one can be a challenge.

Today, we will review two of the most popular ones – LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy, and we will determine which one is the best for online learning.

To make it more interesting, we will have both platforms battle in multiple rounds, and I will rate each one accordingly.

In the end, we will see the final results and ratings from the battle, as well as a summary table to help you make a well-informed decision on which platform to choose.

So, let’s dive right into our LinkedIn Learning vs. Udemy review:

Round 1: Course variety

One of the most important factors that we have to consider when it comes to online learning is course variety. Do you have enough topics, courses and professors to choose from?

Here is what the numbers have to say:

Table 1. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Course variety

In terms of course variety, Udemy is the clear winner – in fact, they offer the world’s largest selection of courses according to their own website.

On Udemy, you can find courses on thousands of topics – from Design and Marketing to Personal Development, Lifestyle, Health & Fitness, Photography, Music, Teaching, and Religion.

In comparison, LinkedIn Learning focuses mainly on developing your digital skills across three main topics: Business, Creative and Technology.

Their courses revolve around technology, tools and digital strategies, and you won’t find anything on lifestyle or health & fitness, for example. In this sense, LinkedIn offers significantly less variety.

Results after the 1st round:

• LinkedIn Learning: 7.0 / 10.0 points
• Udemy: 9.0 / 10.0 points

Round 2: Course Quality

In Round 1, we talked about course variety – however, we know that quantity doesn’t mean anything if there is a lack of quality. For this reason, Round 2 of LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy will take a look at the courses from another perspective – quality.

Which online learning platform offers better courses, and what makes them better? To determine the quality, here are the factors that we will be looking at:

Table 2. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Course variety

And now, let’s put the table into context:

Quality of the faculty

LinkedIn Learning scores high in this section because the platform has a faculty with an excellent academic background. It consists of highly-experienced professionals who have been carefully selected and trained by LinkedIn.

Udemy, on another hand, doesn’t have a guaranteed faculty quality across all of its courses. It ranges from amateurs that are recording from their room with a completely improvised video set-up, to experts with a more professional video set-up.

Level of consistency

LinkedIn Learning has an excellent consistency across its courses, as all of them comply with a minimum level of quality. Of course, some courses can level up or offer more practical content – but overall, the minimum viable product is there, and at a quite satisfactory level.

Udemy, on another hand, doesn’t have the same consistency and uniformity across its courses. As opposed to LinkedIn, they have a lower entry barrier for instructors – in other words, any knowledgeable person can become one, which of course is great.

However, because it’s so easy, it also means that the quality is not consistent across the whole platform.

Professional recording

LinkedIn Learning also maintains quality when it comes to the recording of their courses. In other words, each video is recorded and edited profesionally – with a script, quality camera equipment, perfect lighting, and in a quiet room chosen specifically for the purpose.

Udemy encounters the same issue that we observed in the last two sections. Since there are all kinds of instructors – some amateurs, some professionals, there are videos that are recorded extremely professionally, but also videos with poor quality, sound, lighting and set up.

Having said this, let’s see the outcome of the LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy battle after the second round.

Results after the 2nd round:

• LinkedIn Learning: 16.5 / 20.0 points
• Udemy: 15.0 / 20.0 points

LinkedIn Learning takes the lead after the second round! But let’s see what happens next:

Round 3: Pricing

The next round of our LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy battle will be interesting because each platform works on a different pricing model. With LinkedIn Learning, you pay on a subscription-based model, while in Udemy, you pay for each particular course.

So, let’s see the numbers:

Table 3. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Pricing

While the prices may seem vary different, there are some important nuances to keep in mind:

LinkedIn Learning

As I explained previously in my article LinkedIn Learning Review: My 100% honest opinion, one of the biggest misconceptions that people have with LinkedIn Learning is that the price of $29.99 is exclusively for the learning platform.

Which is not true. The price, in fact, is for the whole LinkedIn Premium plan that LinkedIn offers to its users, which includes:

• Applicant Insights;
• 3 InMail credits;
• Private Browsing;
• Salary Insights;
• Interview Preparation;
• The Who’s viewed your profile feature;
• And LinkedIn Learning.

Which means that you can’t really pay for LinkedIn Learning exclusively, you have to get access to the whole Premium Plan, which is great because you can also take advantage of additional paid LinkedIn tools and features.

On another hand, as we mentioned previously, the platform works on a subscription-based model. This means that you pay for the month, and you get access to all online courses which is great.

On the negative side, you don’t have any discounts – they may offer you a temporary 50% off for one month as a way to retain you if you want to cancel the Premium Plan (it happened to me). However, you don’t have a discount for signing up for the plan in the first place.

Udemy

With Udemy, you have courses ranging from $9 to $300. However, the platform is known for constantly having discounts, which means that you can get a lot of courses for about $15 with the discount.

Without the discounts, a lot of their courses can be pricey:

To put things into perspective, for the price of $132.70per course (Ultimate Google Ads Training, as seen in the example above), you can pay for 4 months of LinkedIn Learning.

Of course, if you only want to do one particular course that you have really put an eye on it, it makes much more sense to pay for a single course and not for a whole month of subscription. Besides, you get a lifetime access to the course with Udemy.

However, if you want to reap off the benefits of an online learning platform, and get a taste of many courses, in this case LinkedIn Learning’s pricing model would be a better choice.

And now, let’s see how the overall results of our LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy battle:

Results after the 3nd round:

• LinkedIn Learning: 25.0 / 30.0 points
• Udemy: 22.0 / 30.0 points

Round 4: Certifications

In most cases, when we do online courses, we want to get a certification of completion as a reward for our efforts. This way, we can upload it to our LinkedIn profiles, share it with our network, or even add it to our CVs.

For this section, our table is rather simple:

Table 4. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Certificates

Both online learning platforms offer certificates of completion at the end of each course. And the best part is – you can easily add them to your LinkedIn profile.

Just go to the Licenses & Certifications section of your LinkedIn profile, type the name of the course, and select the corresponding issuing organization:

In this section, both LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy performed excellent, so the results don’t change much. So far, LinkedIn Learning is leading in the battle, but let’s see what happens next.

Results after the 4th round:

• LinkedIn Learning: 35.0 / 40.0 points
• Udemy: 32.0 / 40.0 points

Round 5: Course presentation

Sometimes, it can be challenging to select a course out of thousands of courses that look promising. In Round 5 of LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy, we will be evaluating how each platform is presenting its courses, and how helpful it is for the users.

Table 5. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Course Presentation

Video introduction to the course

Each platform offers an introductory video to the course, but in a slightly different manner. Apart from the introduction, LinkedIn Learning also offers a couple of free videos to help you decide whether you are interested in the course.

This is for those who are not paying for the Premium Plan yet. If you are already paying for it, all videos are automatically unlocked.

Udemy also has an introductory video, but where they fail (in my opinion) is that most of them are really short, and don’t show the practical value of the course. Some of them are quite vague and you can’t get a good grasp of the course from it.

User ratings

The main reason why LinkedIn Learning scores lower in this section is because it lacks user ratings and reviews. This makes it difficult to see whether users enjoyed the course and it was worth their money.

However, it is important to keep in mind that in LinkedIn Learning. you are not paying by course, you are paying per month. This means that you can easily start whatever course you like, try it, and simply close it if you don’t like it.

On another hand, things are a little bit different with Udemy. Since you pay per course in Udemy, having a good, detailed description and user reviews is absolutely crucial when selecting a course.

After all, if you didn’t like it, you would only be disappointed that you spent your money on it, and Udemy would have to handle it. So, having a good presentation is really helpful so that users can carefully evaluate where to spend their money.

Course description

To finish off this section of our battle LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy, we also have the course description factor – in other words, how detailed is the overview of the course, and how easy it is to get a general idea of it.

In this sense, I can definitely say that Udemy provides significantly more detailed descriptions of its courses and the topics that they are covering.

On top of that, they also have a detailed description of each instructor – in LinkedIn Learning, you will only see the name of the professor and a link to their LinkedIn profile.

But then again, as we mentioned, considering that you pay per course in Udemy, it is definitely more important for them to provide detailed overviews. If you are already paying for Premium in LinkedIn, you can easily discard the courses that don’t seem interesting to you.

Results after the 5th round:

• LinkedIn Learning: 43.00 / 50.00 points
• Udemy: 40.5 points / 50.00 points

Final results: LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy battle

Now that we have the final results, we are ready to make some conclusions.

Although Udemy offers a bigger selection of online courses on a wider variety of topics, LinkedIn Learning is a better learning platform because it provides higher quality at a lower price. For just $29.99 per month, you can get unlimited access to all of its courses.

And here is a summary of our LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy comparison:

Table 6. LinkedIn Learning vs Udemy: Summary

And that was it from me for today! As always, thank you for taking the time to read my article, and I hope to see you in the next one! In the meantime, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments below.

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