Scrimba offers hands-on coding courses and self-paced frontend development bootcamps with an innovative interactive screencast format. The curriculum includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, responsive web design, APIs, UI design, React, and more. Scrimba’s interactive screencasts, project-based format, and personalized project feedback provide a unique learning experience that sets it apart from other online coding courses. If you're an aspiring professional frontend developer or just starting out to learn coding, Scrimba is among the best options money can buy. That said, Scrimba's excellence in teaching frontend development comes from hyper-focus; if you're aiming to learn full stack web development, or other tech topics like data science or DevOps, you'll want a different solution.

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Bottom Line

Scrimba is Great For:

• In-depth hands on learning; you’re going to get a lot of hands-on practice
• Getting feedback on your work
• An active, engaged learning community
• Project-based learning
• Bootcamp-level training at a fraction of the cost

Why You Might Want a Different Solution:

• You want access to teachers; Scrimba’s help is from peers and support staff, not from the instructors.
• You want a job search guarantee. This is the major tradeoff with the platform vs. attending a coding bootcamp.
• You’re already a professional software developer, and just want to get familiar with frontend technologies.
• You want to learn languages like Python, Java, .NET, C#, PHP, Rust, Go, or Haskell
• You want to learn full stack web development; Scrimba focuses on frontend web development.
• You want to learn mobile app development
• You want to learn data science, DevOps, or cybersecurity.

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What is Scrimba?

Scrimba is an interactive tech skills learning platform. Scrimba positions itself as a solution for aspiring software engineers - a lower-cost alternative to coding bootcamps.

Scrimba's major areas of focus are frontend development, including CSS, JavaScript, and JavaScript frameworks like React, and coverage ranges from the fundamentals to advanced topics.

Scrimba's pro subscription unlocks over 60 courses, including the comprehensive 77-hour Front-End Path, at a flexible subscription plan. As of the time of writing, the subscriptions start at $39 per month. They offer discounts for purchasing semi-annual and annual subscriptions, which fit with the typical recommend study plan.

Compared to other online coding courses, Scrimba offers a unique learning experience with interactive screencasts and live events that set it apart from other online coding courses. Scrimba's courses are self-paced, allowing students to study at their own pace and schedule. Students can also attend weekly support sessions with instructors to stay on track.

Many of Scrimba's foundation-level courses are available for free. But while the free versions include the entire curriculum for these free courses, Scrimba's free learning option does not include code reviews or the full community experience. From our experience, these features are worth paying for.

Scrimba's authors are some of the best. Kevin Powell, Bob Ziroll, and Cassidy Williams are among the featured instructors, and are each excellent teachers.

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Why Scrimba Might Be a Great Option For You

Course Library

The material on Scrimba is legitimately some of the best on the internet. The care and consideration going into every section is evident.

The screencasts are really good. The instructors are typically polished, there are very few, if any, errors left in the screencasts that aren’t there for educational purposes.

The “i do, we do, you do” format is an educational best practice, and here it’s pulled off very well.

Top Notch Instructors

• The instructors know their stuff
• They teach in bite-sized chunks
• They keep your hands on the keyboard. Rather than watching them do it, you’re the one doing the work.

Real-world Graded Projects

The projects are actually legit. You’re going to sweat creating the functionality.

Affordable, Flexible Pricing

6-month pricing option is super helpful; especially since they say you can become a web developer in 6 months.

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Some Drawbacks of Using Scrimba

• For the most part, you’re not coding in your own environment. It’s tempting for the sake of time to build right inside the Scrimba interface. But to work as a professional web developer, you’ll need to learn how to work with a local development environment AND how to commit to GitHub. By default, you’re not going to get this within each Scrimba course; it’ll come through dedicated courses on Git.
• In the interface, it’s super easy to accidentally hit the “delete” button instead of the “save” button
• Scrimba's courses are a bit difficult to navigate at first. Some of this is just getting used to using Scrimba. But unlike most other platforms, Scrimba structures their courses around the projects you're building, and the navigation doesn’t have an intuitive taxonomy.

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Getting the Most From Your Scrimba Subscription

1. Budget Plenty of Time for Learning

The times listed are significantly less than it’ll take you to actually complete the material. If you're putting in the work to practice and solve the coding challenges, and to complete the projects, you'll probably spend 2-3 times longer than the time listed. This can be difficult if you're trying to learn the material in a specific timeframe.

We recommend budgeting twice the listed amount of time.

2. Be Consistent, But Space Out Your Learning to Increase Retention

Aim to be consistent with regular learning (preferably daily), but try to avoid binging. You could complete an entire course in 1 week; but splitting it up over 2-4 weeks will help you make sure you really grasp the concepts.

3. Take Detailed Notes

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Why You Should Trust Us

Curricular Guides are written by a team of technical professionals, course developers, and lifelong learners.

For this guide, the team spent over 40 hours testing and evaluating the Pluralsight platform, its core features, and some of its highest-rated courses.

The lead of this project, Brian Green, has worked in developer education since 2009. He built the content development teams at Pluralsight and Udacity, in the process working with hundreds of authors to build courseware, and developing quality standards and tutorials to improve course quality. As of writing, he estimates he has spent nearly a year of his life taking or reviewing online courses, on topics ranging from Web Development, Networking, Server Administration, DevOps, Cybersecurity, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

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