Pluralsight learning platform review

Pluralsight is based in Draper, Utah, with additional offices in Boston, Dublin and Sydner, with a goal to “Create progress through technology.” Unlike some online learning platforms that offer everything from art appreciation to zebra anatomy, Pluralsight is laser focused on upskilling existing workforces to keep up with our accelerated pace of digital transformation.

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The company has partnered  with multiple organizations, including Nasdaq, Adobe, and ADT. With its over 1,700 employees, Pluralsight has more than 17K business accounts.

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Features

While Pluralsight is focused on the enterprise market, individuals can also avail themselves to the courses offered as there are individual plans as well. While many courses are offered, the content is focused on computers and technology, literally to the exclusion of everything else. It is also more professional grade, and at a higher and deeper level than some other video streaming platforms, so those looking for a weekend Raspberry Pi project to do with a child definitely won’t find it here.

With that out of the way, not everyone needs to be a Chief Technology Officer to take advantage of the offerings. We decided to create a free account to get a better feel of the offerings. Annoyingly, not only did you need to provide your phone number, but you also had to agree to receive SMS messages for updates and marketing purposes (there is a box to consent to this, but without it checked, we were told to refresh the browser, which we did, but neither time did the account creation go through).

Things actually got worse from there. We next were sent an email to confirm the account, which included both a link, and a 6 digit alphanumeric code. When we did that, we were told that the link had expired, although the original email did not indicate any expiration time on it. We were then given the option to get another link, which we did multiple times. However, after checking the email account, including the spam folder, we did not receive a reset code, and could not proceed with our free trial. At this point we abandoned further efforts, although the next step would have been to contact support.

Plans and pricing

We did not find available pricing for the Enterprise plans, but this is fairly typical as they would get priced by volume, with available features bundled into a custom plan. They usually require company contact.

To get an idea of the costs involved, we delved into the Individual plans offered. There is a free trial offered, but the length is relatively short at 10 days. There are two tiers of plans, which starts with the Standard Plan. This plan runs $29 monthly, or a discounted yearly at $299 per annum. This lower plan features the “Core course library, paths and skill assessments,” and this is specified further to include course discussions, exercise files, offline viewing, guides and badges. The core library is 2500+ of the most popular courses.

Moving up to the higher tier is the Premium Plan, which comes in at $45 per month, or discounted when paid annually to $449. The upgrade gets you the “Entire library of core and expanded courses, exams, projects and hands-on learning,” which includes everything in the lower plan, and adds in projects, interactive courses, and certification practice exams. The expanded library is over 7000+ topics, including more advanced, and niche topics.

Support

The support for Pluralsight is certainly direct communication, showing how it meets the demands of enterprise. This includes a direct toll free number, with available hours 8 AM to 5 PM weekdays. There is also a direct email, so users can easily submit the issue for a response, and this is staffed 24/7.

In case either of those is not enough, there is also the option for a contact portal, although there is little need with a direct email option in our estimation. There is also a FAQ, with oodles of predone content to answer the more common questions.

Just to round out the discussion, there are no educational videos, eBooks or whitepapers. The chat does not come up on the Help Center, although elsewhere on the site it popped up.

User reviews

To get a further idea of the service, we looked at the reviews of the Pluralsight iOS app, which overall gets a more than respectable 4.7 out of 5 stars. It is also a good sign that it gets frequent updates, with the latest version of 3.17 dating from August 25, 2021. Despite the generally favorable reviews, some issues that surface include erroneous search results, downloaded videos that are randomly deleted, and poor Chromecast support. There are developer responses to the issues, which is at least encouraging that the company is keeping aware of the issues, although users point out that some of these concerns have gone on for a while.

Additionally, there is an Android app as well for Pluralsight. It also garners high marks, with a similar 4.6 score out of 5. Similar issues are also present on this version of the app, such as playback on a Samsung TV, and deletion of downloaded videos.

Final verdict

The online educational platform, Pluralsight, had us enticed with its advanced computer focused course offerings. We appreciate its in depth course offerings, the highly rated apps, and the direct support offerings. The detractors are the short free trial period, the limited hours of phone support, and that the upper tier is required for the practice certification exams. With our poor experience of trying to create a free account, and the multiple difficulties encountered, we are hesitant to recommend this platform, when more user friendly options are available.

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