Is Pluralsight worth it? (Pluralsight review 2021)

people are definitely interested in pluralsight but what is this platform all about and is it worth your time and money well i coughed up some cash recently for an annual premium membership and today i'm taking you behind the scenes of pluralsight what's up developers it's real tough candy from real tough canada i o popping back on for another review with you today we are checking out pluralsight but not just any plural site they have the monthly personal plan they have the annual personal plan but i decided to go all out and get into this premium annual plan for 449 per year this is what you get with the personal essentially the videos plus the entire course library is video based you have learning paths offline viewing mobile and tv apps all this stuff related to the videos same thing with the personal same thing with the premium you also get the assessments included with all these tiers so with the premium plan you get certification practice exams interactive courses and projects and to be really honest the two reasons i signed up for the vip premium plan was because i wanted to see the interactive courses and the projects these are both really big features and i feel like just the the personal plans would be pretty underwhelming so i upgraded and today we're going to take a look at some of those features and go behind the scenes let me pop on to my account over here now this is my home page as you can see i've been exploring a lot of courses introduction web development react getting started javascript basics uh managing cisco products because why not and for those of you who don't know i'm a software developer but there are it and cyber security course tracks here as well i hit the browse button right here and as you can see there's a section on software development it ops information and cyber security and that's kind of the first thing if not the first thing that popped out to me about this platform is that they have a lot of options so if you want to explore your different career paths or possibilities in this thing we call tech pluralsight might be a good place to start with that just because they do lay out the different paths the different disciplines so clearly on the browse section so i'm going to go into software development we'll hit view more and see what we're working with there are a lot of courses here 245 results for angular c-sharp has 139 react 69 some of these courses built in application resiliency microsoft azure developer holy smokes it's kind of too much for me right now so i'm going to go back i'll hit web development and we will see what they have for us 290 results now the top result here is called introduction to web development good choice if you're just starting out web development we'll click on this as you can see though before i do there are reviews that students gave to each of these courses now strangely i can't click or read the reviews i can just see the star ratings and how many people left to review so there's really a lack of context there and i think that's kind of a disservice but i'll i'll save the critique for later on let's let's go explore this and you can get a feel for their video page and how this is laid out and if i remember correctly this is actually a front-end masters course oh yeah i recognize that samurai music we'll go to what is css and so it's a live lecture format but to be clear front-end masters do not produce all the videos in here and so how this works is there are these are independent contractors from my understanding they produce courses and they submit them to pluralsight so there are a ton of different instructors there are a ton of smaller development education outfits submitting their materials the quality is really all over the place not just web development but some of their it stuff some people sound like robots and they're just reading off slides it's very boring very dry other instructors are more engaging and it is really inconsistent that is something i noticed so let's keep going down here we have full stack web development with python 2015 last updated that's over five years ago i wouldn't trust this course react getting started this one's from 2020 and i do appreciate that the dates are published here but this is web development and of course that is four five and six years old no doubt you're going to run into some roadblocks when it comes to developing when it comes to setting up your local environment working on projects even getting the simple stuff to work now for example front-end web development get started by joe eames i actually know this guy he sponsored a video about six months ago on my other channel realty of candy he now is in charge of thinkster.io but this more importantly is from 2014 over six years ago getting started with front end web development and in the content in here if this was the year 2014 this content would be fine but once we get into this section i didn't go through all of all of these but i said okay where where should i start let me go to basic libraries and tools and i was looking at some of these lectures uh talking about mvc frameworks talking about knockout and backbone and these things are really in web development years ancient history and so to spend your time studying antiquated technologies is not a real good use of your time especially because we do have so many other great instructors and platforms out there that do keep their material up to date so that was a bummer i love the auto dark mode here i love the color combos i love the setup of this um but getting into the content was my first big oh no why do you do this to me let's go in to the browse area and then i'm going to show you guys some of my benefits as a premium member so again the two reasons i really did sign up for this were for the interactive courses and the projects so let's go check out these projects there are a few things that i do like about these projects number one they're really diverse and if you want to explore different technologies and really just start building something you can do it java to securing spring data to building a personal budget with python implementing oauth with node.js on the other hand if you don't know what project to tackle if you're a code newbie this can be overwhelming some of these say they're for beginners and it would be really nice to have a sort option here where you can sort it by beginner intermediate or advanced where you can sort it by technology most of these projects are from 2020 though which that pleased me that was good to see let's go down here to the first project this is the hello pluralsight project i took a crack at this one the other day just to see the the flow and i really like the concept with this going into the other projects the concept is similar if not the same you're setting up your environment and then you do the project and after that you submit your code to pluralsight they check it and then they share with you or their program shares with you what you need to improve or if you got it completely right so i downloaded this and let me show you my index file i didn't do anything with this thing and you're going to see how this works so as you can see a pretty sad lonely html file and in the project they wanted me to add a page title add a header element create an unordered list i didn't do any of that stuff so let's see if they yell at me when i drag my project here it says drag and drop your project folder here to check your work so i'll just go ahead and drag that here and in real time pluralsight is checking my work i just love this feature i haven't seen this anywhere else you can get nearly instantaneous feedback and for each of these components i can also watch the solution and compare my solution let's go to the other premium feature interactive courses this is a great addition to ostensibly but once you get into it i'm seeing the same type of problems no way to organize no worried no way to filter or sort these courses so if i want to go learn sql i have to go all the way down here and every time i want to go check out an interactive course i have to scroll all the way down here i would love to see some sort and filter options with this so going down here let's check out some javascript using alert confirm and prompt this is an introduction to the very basics of the javascript language learn how to work with the built-in alert confirm and prompt functions the interactive course was formerly part of javascript road trip 2 on code school so this is another example of the feeling i get of these things being hastily put together where they didn't take the time to rebrand it they probably bought out smaller companies and bought their material and put it on their platform which is great that's business right but as a student i need it to be a little more cohesive so these interactive courses start out with the video short lecture eight minutes and it brings you to an interactive code editor right in your browser no setup required and these interactive code editors are one of my favorite things i've been seeing in a lot of these learn to code platforms because it can save you it will save you hours of setup time i'm going to submit this code and see what happens incorrect submission oops it seems we're still logging our messages we need to change our console.log function calls to an alert so they give you hints and if you're still not getting it you can see the answer and they will pop up let me apply changes here so my changes popped up i submit and now i got it right and that's the gist of the interactive videos so here is what i do like about pluralsight number one i like the concept of the project workflow i really like that whatever project you take you're working with git you're getting that organization going it's something you're going to use in the real world and it was really neat seeing these projects being run against these tests and having that nearly immediate feedback something i haven't seen on other platforms i also like some of the more intermediate course topics and their certification prep offerings now that's something i really didn't get into in this review but as you can see there are a lot of options here maybe some stuff you've never heard of so this can be a good platform to start exploring maybe just you know test the waters here is what i don't really like about this platform number one these courses need updating especially web development having a web dev course that's six years old is it's not good it's just not good i also think they need to pay more attention to detail better organization i feel like a lot of the material and a lot of the features were hastily thrown together filtering options basic filtering options would be a huge upgrade the instructor quality varies a lot of the instructors are very obviously reading from a slide some instructors do sound pretty robotic so it does become a little impersonal from what i saw the student discussions are on discuss on a different window there's no integrated q a in the videos like udemy you can just hit a tab and there's a huge q a section for what i'm paying again for the price point i want to see a better community section and that brings me to my final point i don't like this price point i think it's too expensive for what i got especially because of the issues i mentioned earlier i'm just not seeing where the value is with that all in all i think pluralsight is just okay it's not on my list of top-tier go-to platforms that goes for both their personal plans and their premium plan if you can get your work to pay for a premium plan or if your library offers it for free or whatever it might be worth it for some of the projects otherwise i would stick with their free trial and then move on to the next platform but again they do have the free trial for all these plans so explore it you know maybe there is something you do like and if you sign up for the premium you still get like seven or ten days of premium you can check out those projects i think the project workflow is one of the strongest suits of the premium plan maybe by next year at this time i will be able to revise my review that would be awesome that'd be super cool because i think pluralsight does have a lot of good features it's just um you know the negative ones overshadow the good ones thanks for watching and i'll see in the next video

Channel: Tech Course Review

Views: 17,541

Rating: 4.8557377 out of 5

Keywords: pluralsight, pluralsight review, pluralsight review 2020, pluralsight review 2021, is pluralsight worth it, pluralsight pricing, what is pluralsight

Id: Xp4XmijEfvk

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020