Udemy free courses: what free means on a marketplace
Udemy is not a school with one policy; it is a marketplace where each instructor sets a price, and a course is free simply because its instructor set none. Udemy's help centre defines a free course that way and describes what comes with it as a simplified learning experience. The 16 Udemy free courses listed here were each opened on the date shown as verified and carried the "Free course" label at that moment; the paid catalogue, coupon deals and Udemy's subscription plans are not listed at all.
Every lecture, no certificate
A free Udemy course gives you every lecture and every downloadable resource the instructor attached, at your own pace, with nothing to buy. What it does not give is a certificate of completion: Udemy's help centre states that free courses and courses that consist only of practice tests do not offer one. That single rule is why no Udemy course appears on this site's free certification pages and why every Udemy record here is marked "no certificate". Udemy also states that it is not an accredited institution, so even paid certificates there are completion records rather than credentials.
Q&A, messaging and ads
Two features are switched off for free enrolments even when the instructor has enabled them for paying students: the course Q&A board and direct messaging with the instructor. Free courses may also carry advertisements, which Udemy says can appear before, during or after a lecture, on the course page and inside the player. None of this changes the lectures themselves.
Why most Udemy free courses are short
Since 17 March 2020 any newly published free course must stay under 2 h of video, so the typical free course is a compact introduction: the Python crash course runs 1 hour 48 minutes and the Excel getting-started course 1 hour 30 minutes. Courses published before the cap can be much longer: Useful Excel for Beginners, last updated in 2020, runs 9 hours 36 minutes, and the Digital Marketing Basics course from 2019 runs 5 hours 48 minutes.
Udemy free courses with certificate: the honest answer
There is no such thing on Udemy at the moment. Searches for free Udemy courses with a certificate usually lead to coupon sites, where a paid course is made free for a limited time with a 100 percent discount code. Udemy's help centre draws the line clearly: a coupon, gift or credit applied to a paid course keeps the full paid features, including the certificate, while a course whose price is set to free never issues one. A coupon deal is a paid course at a temporary price of zero, and this site does not track coupons because they expire, often within days.
If a certificate is the point, the same subjects are covered by providers that issue one free: HubSpot Academy for marketing, freeCodeCamp for programming and Google for digital marketing and ads. The free certifications hub lists every course on this site whose certificate costs nothing.
How to find Udemy free courses
On Udemy a free course shows a "Free course" label on its page where a paid course shows a price, and the Udemy catalogue can be filtered down to those courses. The list here is narrower still: each course was checked by hand on the date shown, and any course that later gains a price or disappears is retired from this site rather than left as a broken promise.
- Open the course from its page here; the button leads to udemy.com.
- Check that the course page still says "Free course" rather than showing a price; instructors can change the price at any time.
- Sign in or create a Udemy account, then click Enroll now. No card is requested for a free course.
- Expect the Q&A tab and instructor messaging to be unavailable, and possibly an advertisement before a lecture.
What you can study for free on Udemy
The 16 listed courses cover the subjects people search for most on Udemy: Python and programming, Excel, digital marketing, project management, cyber security, accounting, English grammar, graphic design and interior design. Each entry shows the running time and the section list read from the course page.
Udemy free courses in Python and programming
Two Python courses are listed. The crash course covers installation, editors, variables, strings and numbers in 1 hour 48 minutes; Learn Python for Total Beginners is a longer pre-cap course at 5 hours 36 minutes. Both are beginner level and both stop where a full course would continue, so the natural next step is a longer free Python course such as the University of Toronto's Learn to Program on Coursera; the Python hub ranks all of them.
Udemy free courses in Excel
Excel is the subject where Udemy's free tier goes deepest. Useful Excel for Beginners is the longest course on this page at 9 hours 36 minutes, with sections on entering data, formatting, calculations and charts; Excel Essentials and Microsoft Excel Course: Getting Started are shorter first steps. The Excel hub sets them beside Alison's and Microsoft's Excel material.
Marketing, business and security
For digital marketing there is a 42 minutes fundamentals course and the longer Digital Marketing Basics course. Project management has two short introductions, Project Management Fundamentals and Introduction to Practical Project Management, and accounting a 1 hour 24 minutes bookkeeping basics course. In cyber security, Cyber Security 101 is a 54 minutes overview and Online Safety Training is written for everyday users rather than IT staff.
Design and English
Three design courses are listed: Introduction to Graphic Design works in Canva, Graphic Design Basics for Educators uses free software only, and Interior Design Styles, Colors and Materials is taught by the Planner 5D team. The FREE English Grammar Course is a 2 hours grammar refresher.
Udemy free courses review: the terms in one place
Free means free: no card and the full lecture list. The trade-offs are fixed by Udemy policy rather than by the instructor: no certificate of completion, no Q&A or messaging, possible ads, and a 2 h video cap on anything published since March 2020. The material itself is whatever the instructor recorded, so the running times, section lists and last-updated dates on each page here are read from the course page rather than taken on trust. Compared with a Coursera or edX audit track, a free Udemy course has no deadline and no locked assignments; compared with Alison, it has no assessment and no certificate to buy afterwards.