Coursera Reviews 1,220

I browsed there courses and then found a payment of £43 had been taken from my account. I think their courses must have been behind a free trial or paywall. I wasn’t interested in their courses after browsing and shocked they would have charged me. Infuriating experience talking to their chatbot.

I completed all 5 courses in Google AI Essentials on March 23, 2026, achieving 100% in every course. Immediately after completion, Coursera sent me 5 emails with the subject line "Get your certificate when your free trial ends" stating "you'll get your certificate" with absolutely no mention that cancelling the free trial would block certificate issuance or that payment was required.

Their free trial is essentially useless. Coursera never tells you upfront that completing a course during the free trial means nothing unless you pay. You can study hard, pass every assessment with 100%, and still walk away with nothing if you cancel. The free trial gives you access to the content but they conveniently forget to mention that the certificate you worked for is locked behind a paywall.

When I contacted support, agents Adrian and Gene simply quoted their help article and refused to issue my certificate. When I submitted a formal complaint (Case 06153250) citing misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law, the response was identical with no escalation and no resolution.

Coursera's own help documentation clearly states certificates cannot be earned during a free trial, yet this critical information was deliberately omitted from every single completion email they sent me. Instead they actively encouraged me to "Add your certificate to LinkedIn" implying it was already mine.

This is misleading and deceptive conduct. Their automated emails make promises their policy does not honour. I have retained all 5 emails as evidence and am escalating to the ACCC and FTC.

Do yourself a favour, read every word of their T&Cs before starting any free trial. Don't trust their emails.

experience with Coursera Plus has been very disappointing.
I thought when I signed up for the month-to-month subscription I would have some ability to cancel or get a refund if I decided it wasn’t for me. However, it seems like even though you’ll be charged right away, they do not provide refunds on Coursera.
On top of that, the course quality was, at best, average. While there are some decent materials, much of the content feels outdated or too surface-level to justify the price.
Overall, the combination of non-existent refund flexibility and underwhelming course quality makes this hard to recommend. I expected more from a platform of this scale.

I took a scrum master course, earned a "certificate," then learned that the certificate doesn't hold any value in the real world. It's not part of the Scrum Agile Alliance, so it's not recognized. Why call it a certification if no one outside of Coursera recognizes it as a certification? I felt like I completely wasted my time.

Also, their support teams are awful. I had a critique, and they shut down the case rather than work with me to find the real problem. Very unprofessional.

Coursera was good, a couple of years ago.
I bought a product owner course that suppose to be IBM course!.. I thought I am going to learning something valuable, instead, I got an absolute junk of repeated videos with a bit shuffling to give the illusion that you have an actual material.

I asked for refund because the course did not give me any actual ROI..they refused arguing that I have finished my 7 trial days.and they charged 67 dollars for nothing.

I really do not recommend such a platform anymore..it seems they lost their moral compass and became just another commercial course platform filled with junk material with no absoulte value.

Scam. Avoid.
Does not respond. No support.
Keeps charging credit card even though I have been trying to cancel for months.

Do NOT use this service. I made a trustpilot account just to write this review. If you sign up for a free trial, you will be charged $50 for a monthly subscription even if you CANCEL the free trial. Don't even try to ask for a refund, the customer service is atrocious, and will come up with any reason not to give it to you. Go to your bank and start a dispute. It is sad that this big of company needs to scam their users in order to raise profits. Use ANY other service, I would personally recommend Datacamp, but ANYTHING is better than this crap.

Worse than the absolute worst service, a total scam. I canceled my subscription for a course in Dec 2025 and it still charge me till March 2026. It never email with notifying about the bill and only when the payment was unsuccessful the first time on Feb 2026. Total SCAM by a the CEO

I enrolled in this course intending to pay for just one additional month, but I was automatically placed into a recurring subscription without any clear notification or warning before being charged. Because I didn’t know the charge was coming, I didn’t have the chance to cancel in time.
When I contacted customer support to request a refund, I was told it wasn’t possible. I currently don’t have the time to participate in the course, so being charged for something I can’t use is incredibly frustrating.
This experience left me feeling misled and unsupported. I would strongly encourage clearer billing notifications and more flexible customer service policies.

I would give -3 stars for this company right about now. The company won't help with any issues. I am having an issue with the assessment on the google data analytics. It doesn't give the pictures for the question but it gives answer bubbles to choose. It takes an attempt just to go out, where there is a banner stating that there are updates. I closed and restarted the computer, cleared the cache and cookies and it still didn't work. If you flag it, nothing happens. Coursera has AI that is useless. It can't answer any important questions and it sends an email pushing the accountability on google and then provide FALSE INFORMATION about where to find contact information. This company has an honor code, but won't even assist the customers!! I have flagged this issues, sent emails, and tried the learning community. Yet, there is no way for support or to reach a human support agent. I am losing attempts and time to retake the assessment. It makes you wait 24 hours. I am looking for all means to get this out there. All I need is my assessment fixed and updated with the attempts and it takes days just to continue to get the run around.

Literally the same comment as everyone else.

Terrible refund policy. Zero exceptions made for cancelling a product seconds after it got charged. Just a team that keeps quoting policy. Zero reminders about your card being charged.

I've opened a case with my local consumer protection here in Brazil. I would recommend people do the same for their jurisdiction.

Most of the help is AI driven and even when a human steps in, the person will hide behind policies to avoid refunding or giving you extra time or any solution
You can connect without being subscribed (via link) but you can get charge after the free trial nevertheless and you won't receive any warning prior to the charge. They do everything they can to charge you and then say how it's protected by policies. I prefer Udemy of Skillshare, both more transparent and less shady practice.

Coursera built their reputation largely on the goodwill of universities and peoples releasing their content for free. It was literally in their mission statement to make content freely accessible. Now they've greedily decided to lock away courses under paywall, given to them for free, and use whatever strategy they can to squeeze money out of people. Terrible business, hoarding valuable courses.

I find Coursera’s business practices and technical infrastructure profoundly deceptive. On March 16, 2026, I was charged $35.40 USD for a Coursera Plus subscription. Despite having a booked bank transaction and providing the official statement, my Coursera account dashboard explicitly showed "No purchases found."
​I contacted support three times (Cases 06085369, 06079068, 06085997), and the experience was appalling:
​Contradictory information: One agent acknowledged the charge but refused a refund based on "policy," while another claimed they couldn't even find the transaction on my profile.
​Refusal to troubleshoot: Instead of fixing the technical sync error between their billing and access modules, they simply "closed" the cases and told me they would no longer respond.
​Bad faith: They are essentially retaining funds for a service they have failed to provide.
​I only managed to resolve this by blocking my credit card and initiating a dispute through my bank. Their "Cora" bot and support staff are designed to deflect legitimate claims rather than solve them. Avoid this platform if you value your money and professional time.

I decided to follow a 5 weeks' content on Sales Enablement. First all the content was from Hubspot. So no agnostic approach. Second, all the exercises' files were not accessible (blank pages), link not found. So no possibility to exercise yourself.
Then the certification had to happen on Hupspot Academy (I have to create an account, so now I am getting unwanted sollicitations from Hubspot) -> but the certification and the Sales Enablement course is just no more available on the Hubspot platform !!!
I ask for assistance (I started with a free 7 days plan) -> the AI assistant was really not efficient. Then after I got a "human" contact. Not sure it was a human, though. Even though it stated that they got all my previous exchanges with the AI, I had to provide again screenshots etc. Even with this, it asked me to change browsers etc... and did not answer anything on the certification etc... I've had enough. Thankfully, I was able to "learn" half of the whole 5 weeks course in one day (the timings are so wrong... ) and so I immediately decided I would not pay. Fearing any kind of other content was broken like that this one.
There are other learning platforms. Do not spend money on Coursera. No support, do not answer in a timely manner, and do not understand what you say.

Paid for a certificate, completed the course and the certificate is not there. Complained but there is only a bot and they said someone will manually add it - several weeks later still waiting what a load of rubbish

There is no prompting of auto renewal and after three years and because of my sizable debt this was an oversight...I did contact over a year ago and this stilll was left to auto charge...this is so unacceptable as I did not accesss the content at all do any of the coursework if there are quizzes etc this is an oversight and the company is happy to take the money but dies not even send receipt notice. I need a refund I am single and trying to make ends meet, This is why I am stuck paying interest,

Refused to refund me even though the course wasn’t allowing me to advance to the next videos. Literally paid for a broke product then gave up trying for a refund because I was so tired of wasting time.

Scammers. Nonexistent support. They don’t provide an email address or phone number on their website- only a contact form, and they never respond. I completed the course and passed all the exams, yet my badge was never connected to Credly. It has been over a year with no response or resolution. I strongly recommend not spending even one cent on them.