Udemy is the platform people love to be sniffy about and then quietly keep buying from, and after using it for years I think both reactions are correct. It is an open marketplace, which means the barrier to becoming an instructor is roughly the ability to record a screen, and that single design decision explains almost everything good and bad about it. The good first, because it is real. A small number of instructors on Udemy produce work that is better than what you get from far more expensive providers, and because of the pricing model you can have it for less than the cost of lunch.
Several of the courses in our catalogue that we rate highly live on this platform, and the reason they work is that a motivated independent teacher with no committee to answer to can go deeper and update faster than a corporate curriculum team. Lifetime access matters more than it sounds too. A good reference course you bought three years ago is still sitting in your library when you need to look something up, which is a meaningfully different relationship to the material than a subscription that evaporates when you stop paying. The problem is everything else.
With no vetting, the floor is nonexistent, and the platform's own signals are close to worthless for finding the ceiling. Ratings cluster so tightly in the 4.4 to 4.7 range that they cannot separate a career-changing course from a rehashed documentation tour, partly because reviews are often collected before anyone has finished. Enrolment counts reward whoever marketed hardest in 2019 rather than whoever teaches best now. And the freshness problem is severe in exactly the subjects our readers care about, because a course on an AI framework recorded two years ago is not slightly dated, it is describing software that no longer works that way, and Udemy will happily keep selling it to you with no warning.
The pricing deserves calling out on its own. The permanent sale, where a course is nominally $120 and has been $14.99 every single day for years, is a dark pattern, and the fact that everyone knows it does not make it honest. It also trains people to buy impulsively and accumulate a library of thirty courses they will never open, which is its own quiet waste of money. The refund policy is nominally 30 days and generous, and in practice the wording about consumption is vague enough that enforcement varies, so do not treat it as a guaranteed trial.
Subscriptions in particular are much harder to get money back from than individual purchases. On the Personal Plan, my view is that most people should skip it. It makes sense if you genuinely consume several courses a month across different subjects, and for most learners the honest usage pattern is one or two courses a year, at which point buying them on sale is cheaper and you keep them forever. The practical way to use Udemy well is to invert how the platform wants you to shop.
Do not browse and do not trust the rankings. Find out who the respected teacher is for your specific topic by asking somewhere with actual discussion, a subreddit, a Discord, a colleague, then search for that person by name, check the last updated date before anything else, watch the free preview lectures to confirm you can tolerate their pace and accent and teaching style, and buy on sale. Used that way it is one of the best value resources in online education. Used the way it is designed to be used, it is a discount bin.