Is Coursera Free? At Class Central, we get that question so often that I wrote a guide to answer it. Nowadays, most Coursera courses are free to audit. But if you want to complete graded assignments or get a course certificate, you have to pay.

Coursera’s entire catalog used to be entirely free. But in late 2015, they introduced a paywall. Over the following years, this monetization approach expanded to other online course providers, including edX.

But I always knew that there were a few courses on Coursera that remained completely free. When you enroll in these courses, they offer a “Full Course, No Certificate” option, as you can see below.

coursera-free-course-no-certificate
Free Coursera course: “Full Course, No Certificate” option (with graded assignments)

By contrast, other courses tend to offer a more restrictive free-to-audit option, which doesn’t include graded assignments. This option is also quite easy to miss. You have to look for the “audit” link at the very bottom of the window that pops up when you enroll.

coursera-free-audit-course
Free Coursera course: Free audit option (without graded assignments)

Which Courses are Entirely Free?

Out of Coursera’s 7000 or so active courses, I expected to find about 50 fully-free courses. Imagine my surprise (shock, really) when I found that close to 1700 Coursera courses are still completely free

The biggest challenge is finding which Coursera courses are entirely free. The Coursera website doesn’t provide any “free course” filter. To know if a course is fully free, you have to log into Coursera, enroll in the course, and look for the “Full Course, No Certificate” option.

But there are thousands of courses on Coursera, so short of checking them one by one, it’s tricky to manually put together a list of their fully-free courses. So instead, we went with an automated approach.

Originally, I used the browser automation tool Selenium to check the courses for me. My colleague Bob set me up with an AWS instance and Cloud9 IDE, where I could do this automation. Below is a screenshot of the setup. (Yes, I prefer PHP.)

cloud9-selenium-php-1
Automating the search for free Coursera courses with Selenium

Out of Coursera’s 7000 or so active courses, I expected to find about 50 fully-free courses. Imagine my surprise (shock, really) when I found that close to 1700 Coursera courses are still completely free (that is, including the graded assignments, minus only the free certificate).

Free Coursera Courses

Below, I've compiled the 1700 entirely free courses offered on Coursera. It includes a number of highly-rated courses, including a few from Class Central’s Best Online Courses of All Time, such as Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn.

Here are some stats about the course list:

  • Combined, these courses have 76M enrollments.
  • Combined, they have received 41K reviews on Class Central.
  • There are 9 courses with over 1M enrollments.
  • The most popular one, Yale's Science of Well-Being, has 4.3M enrollments.
  • 58% of the courses are in English and 14% are in Spanish.

To help you navigate the course list, I’ve broken it down by subject. Click on one to jump to the corresponding courses.

More Free Courses

If you don’t find what you need in the course list below, you may want to have a look at my other freeCodeCamp articles:

Personal Development (78)

Health & Medicine (196)

Science (194)

Humanities (197)

Computer Science (103)

Programming (81)

Mathematics (44)

Engineering (88)

Social Sciences (212)

Business (255)

Art & Design (67)

Data Science (45)

Education & Teaching (85)

Information Security (InfoSec) (16)