Comparing Udemy and Prentora

Udemy is the largest course marketplace online, with a near unlimited range of subjects, low entry prices and lifetime access to the courses you buy. If you want cheap, broad access to almost any topic, that reach is real.

We built Prentora, so we are not a neutral party. Everything we say about Udemy on this page links to a source you can check for yourself. Prentora is built around a single honest purchase: dubbing and subtitles in every language included, videos you can download and keep, a refund in one click, and a fair share of every sale going to the instructor.

One thing worth knowing up front: as of May 11, 2026, Udemy is now part of Coursera, which completed its combination with Udemy on that date. That may change Udemy's direction over time, so some of what we describe here could shift.

What Udemy does well

Udemy's real strength is breadth at a low price. Its marketplace holds hundreds of thousands of courses across almost every subject you can name, prices are often very low, and a course you buy outright stays in your account for good. Some of those courses are genuinely excellent, taught by people who are very good at what they do. Udemy also offers a real self-service refund, which many course platforms do not. If you want to sample widely, learn a niche or technical topic that a smaller catalogue will not cover, and pay very little to do it, Udemy fits that well.

At a glance

Anyone can publish a course on Udemy

Udemy is an open marketplace. Anyone can sign up as an instructor and publish, and courses are checked for production basics such as audio and video quality before they go live, but there is no vetting of a teacher's expertise or credentials the way an invitation-only catalogue would do. The upside is enormous range. The downside is that quality is uneven, and you often cannot tell before you buy how good a given course will be. One reviewer put it this way:

Review article · Medium

June 2025

Udemy’s a marketplace, not a curator. You’re at the mercy of third-party creators. Anyone can publish, so course quality varies wildly.

Read the full review(archived)

On Prentora, we invite the instructors we work with and build each course alongside them, with a focus on the theory of learning, refining it until it meets our quality standards. Prentora only invites instructors to the platform who have a proven background and set of skills relevant to what they teach.

Refunds, a real plus with limits

Udemy's refund is genuinely better than what many course platforms offer. There is a self-service 30-day window, which already puts it ahead of platforms with no refund at all. It comes with real limits, though. As of July 2026, Udemy's refund policy includes the following section:

From Udemy · refund policy

We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to limit or deny refund requests in cases where we believe there is refund abuse, including but not limited to the following: A notable amount of the course has been consumed or downloaded by a student before the refund was requested.

View source(archived)

What counts as "a notable amount" is not defined, so eligibility is left to Udemy's judgement, with no defined threshold, and after a pattern of refunds an account can be limited entirely. On top of that, some payment methods, such as iOS in-app purchases, Boleto and Pix, are refunded only as Udemy credit, with no return to your original payment method. So a refund can be genuine and still not go the way you expect. One customer reported being turned down on exactly the "notable amount" wording:

United Kingdom

July 2026

… after watching barely over an hour (71 minutes to be exact) out of 18 hours, I realised that the course was not good, so I asked for a refund and got a message that I could not get a refund, because I had watched a notable amount of the course! Udemy's refund policy is intentionally vague and does not specify what is a notable amount of the course.

Read this review on Trustpilot

Prentora's refund policy is simple: any course purchase can be refunded within 14 days when no more than 3 videos have been watched or downloaded. You can read exactly how it works in our refund policy, an eligible refund is a single click, and we check eligibility automatically, so you are not guessing whether you have watched too much. Refunds go back to your original payment method via our trusted payment partner, Stripe.

Fair pay for instructors

How much of your money reaches the person who actually taught the course depends on how Udemy made the sale. As of July 2026, Udemy's own instructor revenue share page sets out two headline rates: an instructor keeps 97% when a student buys through the instructor's own coupon or referral link, but only 37% when the sale comes from Udemy's marketplace or advertising, where no instructor coupon was used. For most instructors who rely on Udemy to find their students, the 37% figure is the one that matters, and it is calculated on the amount left after taxes and platform fees. Earnings from Udemy's subscription and business plans are different again: according to the same instructor revenue share page, instructors are paid from a shared pool split by how many minutes of their courses were watched, with no fixed share tied to individual sales.

There has also been friction over how instructors' work is used. In 2024, 404 Media reported (archived) that Udemy enrolled instructors into a programme that used their courses to train generative AI, with an opt-out that was brief, hard to find and, for some, already greyed out by the time they saw it. One instructor described the experience:

Review article · 404 Media

September 2024

“I never agreed to any changes to policy with Udemy over the last 5 years,” Katie Stegs, who works in mobile gaming and has a class on Udemy, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Today I get an email about the new AI tools (big surprise) and when i go to opt out in the settings i find that the option is greyed out and that i’m only able to change my preferences during certain periods of the year that they say they will communicate to users?”

Read the full review(archived)

Prentora is built to be fair to instructors, which is a large part of why we sell each course as a single purchase, as earnings based on minutes watched from subscription models across an entire platform tend to be extremely low. Instructors on Prentora earn 70% to 85% of every sale, and we do not and will not use their courses to train generative AI.

Translation and dubbing

On the Udemy marketplace, a course reaches you only in the language it was taught in. The subtitles Udemy adds are auto-generated captions produced by speech recognition in that same language, so they capture what the instructor said without translating it into any other. Udemy is explicit that it does not caption in other languages: its help center says it is "unable to generate subtitles in additional languages other than the ones included above", and that list only ever matches the language a course was already in. There is no dubbing, so the audio stays in the instructor's language, and on-screen text and downloadable resources are left untranslated. The machine-translated subtitles and multilingual library Udemy does run belong to Udemy Business, its enterprise product, and an individual buyer of a marketplace course gets none of that.

Prentora includes both subtitles and dubbing in every language we support, in every purchase. Our dubbing and subtitles are produced with a proprietary, layered pipeline that goes well beyond plain machine translation, and every course is reviewed for the kind of meaning errors that make a translation hard to follow. We also translate the downloadable materials that come with a course.

Download and keep

Udemy lets you download courses for offline viewing, but with strings attached. As of July 2026, Udemy's help center states that offline downloads on its mobile app are encrypted and can only be accessed through the app, and that downloaded content expires after 30 days unless you reconnect to the internet. Some courses do allow a video to be downloaded to a computer if the instructor has enabled it, so this is not absolute, but for most courses the files stay locked to the app and time out.

On Prentora, you can download your course videos for personal use and keep them, as well as stream online. Allowing downloads means accepting some risk of piracy. We would rather take that risk and give paying customers a good experience than lock everyone down to stop a few. There is no DRM, so the files are yours to watch however you like.

Generative AI

Udemy sells and promotes courses on making finished creative work with generative-AI tools. A search for Midjourney on Udemy returns a long list of them, and Midjourney is only one of the tools covered.

On Prentora, we exist to help people build real creative skill through human instruction. We use AI only to make human-taught courses available across languages. Prentora does not support the use of generative AI for creative works.

When Udemy is the better choice

If what you want is sheer breadth, especially niche or technical subjects that a smaller creative catalogue will not cover, Udemy is hard to beat. Prices are low, you can sample a lot for very little, and a course you buy outright stays in your account. If cheap, wide access matters more to you than curation, translation or keeping your own copy of the videos, Udemy's model fits that well.

Prentora is smaller and more selective by design. We work alongside our instructors with a focus on the theory of learning, and each course is a back-and-forth process of refinement until it meets our quality standards. We would rather get a smaller number of courses right, and get the single honest purchase, the translation, and the course you keep right along with them, than race to match a catalogue on size alone.