While these two platforms are often thought to be in direct competition with each other, they actually have quite a few differences that really set them apart.
If you’re not sure which one is right for you, we’ll divulge the benefits and setbacks of each right now.
You want the most out of your online learning experience, and both
It’s time to talk about
Skillshare vs Brilliant Courses Compared
Skillshare (see also our comparison of Skillshare and Coursera) is all about keeping your creativity flowing by enhancing your skills in photography, art, and music, while Brilliant—as their name would suggest—is centered around logic, mathematics, and computer science.
They’re two different experiences with some similarities and some striking contrasts, but how do they stack up against one another? Can they really help you break into a new job? Let’s find out.
What is Skillshare ?
Skillshare is an online learning platform that hosts user-generated courses from experts in their respective fields. While almost anyone can make a Skillshare course, they have guidelines and expectations for their course creators.
For a low-priced subscription, you can learn hobbyist skills such as piano, guitar, photography, art, and more.
Skillshare’s creativity-based focus attracts people to their 20,000+ (and growing) catalog of in-depth, intuitive courses to either enhance a workplace skill or learn something new entirely.
What is Brilliant?
Brilliant is an online education platform centered around logic, mathematics, and science-based skills. Their main draw is helping you develop quantitative problem-solving skills that can be applied to your entire life, although primarily in career paths and breaking into new fields/jobs.
Their motto is “Learn to think”, which accurately describes the type of courses they host. Developing logic and reasoning skills may be even more beneficial to you than taking a technical course, or at least having these skills present beforehand.
When you enter a new learning experience with solid logic and reasoning skills, you end up grasping different concepts and values from that course that you might otherwise gloss over.
What Courses Do They Offer?
Brilliant is about teaching you how to think, not what to think. Because of this, they offer courses that help challenge what you think you know about logic. On top of that, they offer mathematics, physics, and other problem-solving courses that will blow your mind. It’s all about showing you how to approach the core parts of education and intelligence from a new angle.
On the other hand,
The courses they teach aren’t similar, but some of the ways that they go about them are. We’ll get more into their features in a bit to showcase that.
Who Teaches the Courses?
With
Just about anyone can make a course on
With Brilliant, they’re making all of their own courses. While you’re only getting access to a limited number of courses, they’re all carefully crafted by creative professionals and professional developers that know what they’re doing. If they bring in external instructors to teach a Brilliant course, they usually have a hand in how the material is presented, or have the necessary credentials to teach these courses effectively.
Pricing
You can’t really know which one you want to go with if you don’t know which service is within your budget.
You might be surprised to find that they’re both affordable and within a wildly inexpensive range. Annual plans, as with anything, will definitely save you money here.
Skillshare
Skillshare has two main pricing models that will appear to students. First, you have their monthly plan at $19.99 per month.
Anyone would argue that it’s a small price to pay for unlimited access to 20,000+ creatively-driven courses with mostly in-depth coverage. On occasion,
- Learn new skills
- Explore your passion
- Take classes on the go.
"1 year in and still going, their content and courses are great"
If you sign up for the annual plan, it’s $99 once per year. That equates to about $8.25 per month, which is pretty darn affordable. This is one of the best pricing methods for any online course providers, and that includes the likes of LinkedIn Learning, Udemy (see also ‘Which Is Better LinkedIn Learning Or Udemy?‘), and all the top dogs.
There are pricing options available for team-based use, such as if you’re the head of an organization in charge of training, but
Brilliant
With Brilliant, you have two pricing options as well. Go monthly, and you’ll pay $24.99 per month or roughly $300 per year. This isn’t a far cry from
The annual plan is where you save money, though. This ends up being $12.49 per month, or about $150 per year at this price. This requires an all-at-once upfront payment, but you end up paying half of their monthly cost over the same period of time.
If you’re serious about using Brilliant, such as if you’re homeschooling multiple children and want them to have their own profiles and whatnot, then you should go with the group plan. This allows you to basically have one plan per year at $100 but with a minimum purchase of three. Brilliant isn’t really designed for corporate use.
Features
If you’re going to use either service, you should know what features they have. Each feature is a way to interact with the site, app, or your learning experience in some way.
Features describe the utility that these services offer to us. It’s not about having more features, but about having more intuitive features that actually benefit us: quality over quantity.
Skillshare
- Offline Viewing: Download videos and course material to view offline. Always stay in the know and up-to-date on your course material.
- Shared Learning: More than one person can use one account. All you have to do is scroll back in a course; it doesn’t force you to start from one specific point when you return to an in-progress course.
- Free Classes: Skillshare has a library of free classes as well, which you can use after making a free account. Use these are a precursor to deciding if
Skillshare is right for you. - Customer Support: Skillshare has top-notch customer service when it comes to online classes. If you encounter any issues with your subscription, they’ll help clean it up in record time.
Brilliant
- Top-Tier Customer Support: Just like
Skillshare , Brilliant has top-notch customer support that knows what they’re talking about and actually helps solve problems properly. - Interactive Learning: It’s not just viewing videos; you get to interact with a lot of the material to get a hands-on understanding of the skill or topic.
- Intuitive App: Brilliant makes their app interactive just like their site-based service, so you can learn on the go no matter what.
Teaching Methods of Skillshare
Skillshare uses a common online teaching method for online course modules.
A module consists of video content (usually), as well as text-based documents, PDFs, images, and more downloadable content, which all work to teach you one working part of a broad skill. Modules are linear learning methods that bring you from point A through each module to point Z.
With modules, you have to learn the previous one to know the next one. Some modules may include interactive content while others do not.
Depending on what the subject is, if it calls for it, and what the course instructor/creator has included, you may only have video content, making it slightly less interactive. Again, depending on the skill you’re trying to learn, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.