Udemy

What Udemy is

Udemy is an open online course marketplace: instructors publish and sell courses, learners buy them one at a time, and companies buy employee access through a business tier. Wikipedia describes it as a US-based education technology company founded in 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani and Oktay Caglar, based in San Francisco, California, with offices in the United States, Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico and Turkey. The encyclopedia says the platform allows both the creation and the sharing of online courses, and that courses are typically video-based and on-demand.

Ownership changed recently. Wikipedia reports that in December 2025 Coursera agreed to acquire Udemy for about $930 million in equity, and its infobox now lists Udemy as a wholly owned subsidiary with Coursera as its parent. A Zero To Mastery post for learners carries an update about the purchase and says it is not yet clear what will happen to previously purchased courses or to the instructors on the platform.

Wikipedia also gives the company's size: 2024 revenue of US$786.6 million and 1,300 employees. It notes that Udemy held its IPO in the US in October 2021 and reported its first positive net income since that IPO in August 2025.

Publishing and selling as an instructor

For a creator, Udemy is mainly about reach. Stylemix Themes, which makes a WordPress LMS plugin, describes it as a platform where "anyone can share their knowledge and sell their courses", not only universities or companies. Its overview says course creators can make videos, quizzes and other materials to share with students, that instructors can answer questions and give feedback on the platform, and that Udemy helps instructors reach students around the world. The same article says signing up is simple and that Udemy provides helpful resources for planning and creating a course, plus a community of instructors that offers support and advice.

Hosting costs nothing. According to Stylemix Themes, it is free to create and host courses on Udemy and instructors can publish unlimited courses; Udemy earns by taking a commission on sales instead. The article also says Udemy has strict quality standards for courses, which can be challenging to meet. Zero To Mastery looks at the same open model from the learner's side: because anyone can publish, it says, quality varies a lot, and Udemy does not vet courses for relevance or freshness. Wikipedia adds that courses on Udemy can be paid or free, depending on the instructor.

Control over students is the trade-off the sources raise most often. Stylemix Themes says instructors cannot fully manage students' data because the students stay on Udemy, which makes it harder to grow a business independently. Cloud Assess, a training and assessment platform, makes the same point about training providers: they can access learner analytics, but learner records and engagement data remain within the platform, which makes it hard to migrate an audience or integrate fully with an outside CRM. Cloud Assess also says there are few options to customize the look, so it remains a Udemy-branded experience.

Wikipedia records several changes that touch instructors directly. In 2024 Udemy announced that it would cut the percentage of revenue going to what the article calls academic labor, its instructors. In June 2025 it acquired Lummi, an image-generation tool, with the goal of letting instructors add AI-generated content to their courses. Earlier, in November 2015, Udemy was criticized for profiting from pirated courses, and in 2018 it expanded its anti-piracy efforts through Link-Busters.

Revenue share and student prices

Udemy works on a revenue share rather than a subscription for instructors, and two of the sources spell out the split. Stylemix Themes describes two types of commission. When a student buys through an instructor's own coupon or referral link, the instructor gets 97% of the revenue. When a learner finds the course through Udemy's ads or by browsing the marketplace, Udemy gets 63%. Buildfire, a mobile app builder, states the second case from the instructor's side: without the instructor's referral link, it says, the instructor gets only 37% of net sales. Stylemix Themes adds that the share is calculated on net revenue, the amount students actually pay minus taxes or fees such as those charged by Apple or Google.

The Stylemix Themes article is dated April 2024. Zero To Mastery says payouts have dropped and that Udemy now takes a larger cut of each sale, and that many top instructors are leaving because of the lower profit share and heavy competition on most topics. For the upper end of earnings, Wikipedia gives one data point: in 2015 the top 10 instructors made $17 million in total revenue.

On the learner's side, the sources describe low prices. Zero To Mastery calls Udemy affordable, and Alkademy's comparison table lists Udemy's pricing model as individual course purchases, with limited free courses.

What learners get

For a learner, Udemy is a very large catalog of self-paced courses bought one by one. The size depends on who is counting. Stylemix Themes and Learniverse put it at over 210,000 courses; Buildfire and Cloud Assess say over 250,000. Wikipedia's infobox gives 81 million users in 2025, Learniverse says the catalog serves 60+ million learners, and Buildfire counts over 75,000 teachers, trainers and coaches.

Wikipedia says courses are offered in categories including business, academics, health and fitness, and music, with most covering practical subjects such as AWS and Azure training, Excel, or using an iPhone camera. It lists the platform in Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese, and notes that the company began offering over 100 courses in Hindi in February 2023 and began offering its platform in Arabic in August 2025.

The format is simple. Alkademy's comparison lists Udemy's learning format as self-paced, with limited live learning and limited personalized learning, and marks certificates as available. Cloud Assess is specific about what those certificates are: Udemy is not an accredited institution, it provides certificates of completion, and these do not meet the standards required for formal vocational qualifications or industry compliance. Learniverse also describes them as certificates of completion.

Mobile access came early. According to Wikipedia, Udemy offered an iOS app in 2013 and an Android version in 2014; as of January 2014 the iOS app had been downloaded over 1 million times, with 20% of its users accessing their courses via mobile. In 2016 Udemy became accessible via Apple TV as well.

There are AI tools on the learner side too. Wikipedia says the Udemy AI Assistant, a natural language chat interface with a "skills mapping" feature, was introduced in late 2024. Cloud Assess says Udemy has 24/7 support and an AI assistant, both mostly designed to help learners with course content.

Zero To Mastery's main caution for learners is freshness. It says ratings can mislead, because a course that was great two years ago may still show five stars, and that some instructors change only the date on a course without changing the content. Its verdict is still positive for one kind of learner: Udemy is "still great" for someone without a specific goal who wants to learn a wide variety of topics, or when price is the biggest factor.

Udemy Business for training teams

Udemy also sells to organizations. Cloud Assess calls it a dual-purpose platform for experts, organizations and training providers, and says many businesses rely on the Udemy Business tier to give employees on-demand access to a wide range of professional workplace skills. Training providers use it in two ways, according to the same article: as a distribution network to sell their courses, and as a source of ready-made material to supplement existing vocational programs.

Cloud Assess also lists where the business side stops. Basic analytics and progress tracking are available, particularly on higher-tier plans, along with course Q&A and limited cohort-style options on those plans. It says Udemy is not a full-scale learning management system and struggles with role-based enrollment, structured compliance tracking and recording offline, hands-on assessments. Wikipedia reports that in August 2025 Udemy launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that embeds training into enterprise and employee workflows, and Zero To Mastery says the company is moving more toward corporate licensing.

Who it suits

Udemy suits an instructor who wants a ready-made storefront and a very large audience without building a site, and who can bring some buyers of their own, since the sources agree the split is far better on sales through the instructor's coupon or referral link than on sales Udemy generates. Practical subjects of the kind Wikipedia lists, from AWS and Azure training to Excel and phone photography, match the catalog. It suits less well a creator who wants to own the student list, control the branding or keep most of the revenue from marketplace sales, and Stylemix Themes notes that standing out among so many courses takes a strong brand, effective marketing and high-quality content.

For learners, it suits someone who wants an affordable course on a specific practical skill and is willing to judge quality course by course. A learner who needs a formal qualification should take Cloud Assess's point that these are certificates of completion. For training teams, Udemy Business works as an on-demand library of workplace skills; by Cloud Assess's account, a team that needs compliance tracking, branded delivery or assessment of hands-on work would run it alongside a full LMS.