DataCamp Review
Working with data is moving today from some trendy thing to a necessity for specialists from different domains. There are many ways to gain the skills of effectively working with big data sets but right now we will focus on a huge fish–DataCamp. In this Datacamp review, we’ll see what courses the company offers and if they are worth it to get a job.
Note: we check and update this DataCamp review regularly, so all the course details, pricing, and our verdict are accurate as of summer
Is DataCamp worth it?
Here are also a few customers reviews about DataCamp:
DataCamp is a great introduction to the field, but the key to find a job is doing your own projects with the skills. I started my data analysis journey using DataCamp and it personally helped me a lot.
DataCamp gently introduces you to a wide range technologies and subjects including Python, R, SQL, Tableau, Excel, Data Science, Machine Learning, Statistics and Probability and more… But its courses are really only intended for beginners.
DataCamp has a quality curriculum overall. Just keep in mind that merely completing the modules will only get you a job. Once you have more than a couple of skills, use those skills on a real life project.
I’ve been a long time user of DataCamp. It’s good if you lack the basics of Python and getting to know pandas, numpy, seaborn, mpl, basic sklearn and stats. Once you’ve passed the basics, it doesn’t really help you as the coding exercises are basically filling the blanks
How we reviewed DataCamp
If you are here, you are probably interested in the methodology behind this DataCamp review. We’ve tried to make sure this article is comprehensive and as objective as possible, so here is how we approach this.
First, we signed up for DataCamp’s free account. Then, we checked the personal account as well as the course list and completed a few introductory lessons. Next, we upgraded to Premium and took a couple of courses, including Introduction to SQL and Introduction to Python.
Finally, we have collected reviews on DataCamp from Reddit and Quora to get different perspectives and dig deeper into how effective the platform is. This allowed us to better understand the positive and negative sides and make this review diversified.
So, here is a brief recap of the pros and cons to give you more than just an answer to the main question: whether Datacamp is worth it.
So, let’s dive into the details. This DataCamp review will include:
What is Datacamp?
This is an online company that has gathered different data-related courses in one place. The provider has various classes mainly on R, Python, and SQL but also there are classes on Spreadsheets, BI, Tableau, and other similar topics. Those courses can be taken separately or as a set in frames of skill tracks or career tracks (read below about those formats).
In a nutshell, the company includes more than 400 courses which are a combination of videos with practical assignments, over 50 curated learning paths, and more than 100 real-life projects.
As for its features, DataCamp offers skill assessments where you can measure what is your current level of a particular skill. Also, the company has its own working space where you can write, run, and share your code or notes.
Who Is Datacamp for?
While DataCamp courses can be good for anyone, they will be the most beneficial for the following three groups:
- People who want to improve particular skills related to data analysis (for instance, data cleaning, data visualising, basic Pyhton skills, Power BI or Tableau, etc.).
- Complete beginners who want to start a career like a Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Business Analyst, or Python Software Developer.
- People who want to improve data-related skills for working in other business fields like online marketing or finance – so that they can better analyze, visualize, and report marketing data as well as make data-driven decisions.
All in all, this e-learning provider works best for beginners and intermediate-level students.
If you feel like DataCamp is not an option for you, check out this list of the best DataCamp alternatives. Alternatively, check out these detailed comparisons of Datacamp vs Codecademy or Dataquest vs DataCamp.
DataCamp courses
On Datacamp, you can choose among 3 learning formats to learn data-related skills. The main difference between them is the duration.
- Single courses – short 3-4 hours programs focused on a specific narrow topic. These are nearly 400 courses related to Python, R, or SQL.
- Skill Tracks – longer programs that consist of a series of courses. Skill Track by Datacamp is also a set of courses to master a specific skill. You can choose one of 50 skill tracks of approximately 15 hours duration each. Those programs cover Python, R, or SQL, however, here additionally are courses on spreadsheets, shell, and some theoretical issues. Among them you can find such programs as Statistical Fundamentals, SQL Fundamentals, Image Processing, Applied Finance, Importing and Clearing Data, Programming with R or Python are on the list of Datacamp skill tracks.
- Career Tracks – the longest form of learning which includes a number of courses and is made to prepare you for a new career. This is also a set of courses in a specific domain so that a person can learn new skills from scratch so to start a career. On datacamp.com, you can choose one of 14 career tracks related to Python, R, or SQL, where each track includes 15 single classes and takes on average 70 hours to complete.. Among them are Python or R Programmer, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Statistician, Machine Learning Specialist and some other programs.
DataСamp pros & cons
What we like about DataСamp
- It’s good for beginners, DataCamp courses don’t require any prior experience or education.
- You don’t need to install any special programs (like Pycharm for working with Python).
- You can easily switch from one course to another (e.g. from SQL to Python). This is good if you hesitate about which programming language is the best for you to learn.
- The price of the subscription is low, its courses are cheaper than the similar ones by competitors.
- There are constant updates of the content. There are new courses coming out almost every month (for example, the latest ones are Introduction to Data Visualization with Plotly and Hypothesis Testing in R).
What we don’t like about DataСamp
- If you are not a complete beginner, many courses might be too easy for you. Many exercises require you to just fill in the blank spaces or provide you with similar tasks.
- Sometimes, there might occur problems with paying for the subscription; when you don’t realize that you have been charged.
- Customer support may not answer your questions immediately or just ignore your requests.
Programming languages
DataCamp has tons of courses but not many programming languages to choose from. It basically has content on two languages: Python and R. Additionally, you can find courses on SQL and some other technologies. These are the programming languages most commonly used for working with data–and this is the main focus of DataCamp.
In a nutshell, DataCamp has over 150 Python courses on its list, over 140 courses on R, and over 30 SQL courses.
Content quality
The courses on DataCamp are of high quality, well-structured, and easy to follow. According to DataCamp, their instructors spend on average 10 to 30 hours on creating a new course. The content includes videos that introduces the concept and exercises to learn the concept and practice coding. The quizzes are quite engaging.
What is important is that the content is regularly updated and the company adds new courses almost every month. Here is the list of courses that are planned for 2023.
Instructors
All instructors on DataCamp are people who have experience in the data industry (usually commercial experience) and are skilled in Python, R, or SQL. Among instructors are people who work at Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Nike, and other big companies. Most of them have full-time jobs but create courses on a project or part-time basis. Instructors can have no prior experience with teaching or mentorship; DataCamp helps them organize all the processes of creating a course.
There are over 270 instructors in total and you can check the list here. Each DataCamp instructor has their own page with their bio and links to social media.
Ease of use
Opening an account and starting a course on DataCamp is really easy and straightforward. To open an account you just need your email and password; you can also sign up with your Gmail account, LinkedIn or Facebook profile.
When you sign up, you have your own dashboard with your progress, courses and projects you have started, and access to live events.
You can also go to the course list, use a filter and find a new course for later; then, you can bookmark it and then easily access it from your workspace. Moreover, you can join a Slack community from your DataCamp dashboard.
Languages
Courses on Datacamp are only available in English, but videos include subtitles in other languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and more). Translation into other languages for instructions and exercises is not available.
How to use Datacamp
- Choose a course
First, you should decide on the technology to learn (R, Python, or SQL). Then, you can browse all the content related to it. For instance, if you’re interested in Python go to Products in the menu and then by choosing Python under the Course Catalog section. Then, you will be taken to the page, where you can choose either a skill track, which is a longer form of content, or a course, which is a shorter form of learning.
2. Choose a plan
Then, you need to buy a Datacamp plan to be able to access all the content you need. You can do it from a course page directly or by clicking on Pricing in the menu.
How a single course is structured
Each DataCamp course normally consists of a theoretical part and a set of tasks. The first part is usually a 3-5 min video where an instructor explains the concept and it’s simultaneously illustrated on the screen. There are also transcripts under each video.
As for the practice, there are two types of tasks:
- Quizzes where you just need to answer some questions like “What tasks you can solve with this programming language?” and a list of answers to choose from. Those are usually the first quizzes in a chapter.
- Quizzes where you need to read the instructions and then type an answer (to code) using the in-built. Then you can run the code and submit your answer. If you struggle with the answer, you can use a hint provided by DataCamp.
Here is an example of such a task:
Suppose you have $100, which you can invest with a 10% return each year. After one year, it’s 100 x 1.1 = 110 dollars, and after two years it’s 100 x 1.1 x 1.1= 121. Add code to calculate how much money you end up with after 7 years, and print the result.
And here is how it looks on DataCamp: the instructions and the interface for writing your code as an answer.
PYTHON, R, SQL & MORE
Datacamp pricing
Datacamp offers two types of pricing packages – for individuals and for teams. Individual customers can choose between two subscription options:
- Free DataCamp plan where you can access the first chapter of each course, do skill assessment, and apply to jobs listed on DataCamp. Moreover, there are six completely free courses.
- Premium subscription which is $25/mo (if billed annually) or $39/mo (if billed monthly) where you get acces to all the content, earn certificates, join its Slack community, and get priority support.
Teams plan (for teams) costs $25 per user per month and requires at least five users for a subscription.
Read more about DataCamp pricing to get all the details.
Popular DataCamp courses
- Datacamp Data Science Python Career Track. This program by Datacamp includes 23 courses and takes about 88 hours to complete it. It covers basic Python topics like data types and functions and then proceeds to more data-focused ones like Data manipulation with Pandas, Data Visualisation with Matplotlib and Seaborn. The track also includes classes on Statistics and Machine Learning.
- Machine Learning Scientist with Python. This career track runs 93 while consisting of 23 single courses. This program is aimed at teaching how to train models, evaluate their performance and improve or customize it by tuning parameters. This track also covers such topics as NLP, working with images and using Spark and Keras (Python libraries).
- Data Scientist with R. This career track runs 76 hours and consists of 19 courses. It shows how to effectively work with data – structure, import, clean, or visualize it. It also touched on statistical and machine learning techniques as well as the most popular R packages. Among other R career tracks are R Programmer, Machine Learning Scientist with R and others.
- SQL Fundamentals. One of the best programs to become acquainted with this technology is SQL Fundamentals, a skill track that includes 5 courses and lasts 21 hours. This track shows what SQL is, how to join and perform other actions with data. Moreover, it teaches how to work with data in PostgreSQLAmong other skill tracks focused on SQL are two: SQL Server Fundamentals and SQL Server Toolbox.
- Data Analysis in Excel. This one is useful to learn new Excel functions to work with data. The course covers 35 functions like VLOOKUP and AVERAGEIF(S). It also includes training on the data.
- Quantitative Risk Management with Python. This course shows how Modern Portfolio Theory can be applied to the financial crisis of 2008, discusses Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as risk measures, presents how Monte Carlo simulation can be used for predicting uncertainty, and also reveal how to utilize neural networks for risk management. During this course, you will be utilizing such Python libraries as pandas, scipy, and pypfopt and others.
- Sentiment Analysis in R. This course is part of text mining and it reveals how to identify emotional intent and divide text (e.g. reviews) by positive and negative language markers. This course also includes a case study where you can analyze Airbnb reviews, are they positive or negative ones.
How to choose a course on DataCamp?
There are so many courses on Datacamp that it might be hard to make a choice. Here are some tips to consider:
- If you have no prior knowledge, start with courses that start with “Introduction” or just short courses to check if you like it (e.g. Introduction to SQL)
- If you have some prior knowledge but don’t want to dive into a specific field, choose most popular courses or ones with the word “Intermediate” in their names (e.g. Intermediate SQL)
- If you are planning to work in a specific field or have a specific field of interest, pick the programs accordingly (data analyst, data scientist, business analyst, marketing analytics, etc)
Datacamp for Business
The company offers solutions for employees who want to improve the data skills of their teams. This subscription allows creating custom learning paths and features tools for measuring the team’s progress as well as creating reports on that.
Here you can request a free demo.
Datacamp reviews
After inspecting the feedback from Datacamp customers, most seem to agree: Datacamp gives more benefits for beginners than for people who already have skills–but still, it depends on the course. All in all, it’s a narrow-focused online company that is a good choice in terms of value/money. But you need to have a lot of self-work and motivation to transfer from learning on DataCamp to landing a job.
So, here are some of the fresh DataCamp reviews.
“DataCamp is based on practice, it has a lot of practice assignments that gives you hands-on experience and it is advised to be taken after you have done your theoretical study in this field, after which you will be able to practice what you have learned.”
“Datacamp courses are light, short and straight to the point; I would call them “topic classes”. They include short videos, online coding that act as quizzes, and slides. They do not have much interaction or consultation forums.“
“DataCamp is a very very good step 1. It removes obstacles, makes it convenient, gives you good instruction, and you learn basics quickly. Once you are through a Datacamp program, you will be at step 2, and will be able to easily make the jump to more rigorous resources.“
“I used DataCamp for a long time. I do not recommend it. Finding a textbook and working off the examples they have in python is probably your best bet.”
“I like DataCamp because you can get in quickly and learn something in web browser. It does not change the fact original projects are the way. I just started with spark and a few quick lessons gives me an over view. For my self as projects get complicated 30 min is not enough time to even remember where I am as I code intermittently. So data camp keeps me learning when my main duties take all my time. It was pivotal early before I coded as a work responsibility. I like the phone app as well.“
“I came into data camp with no experience whatsoever I have a premium subscription and I do like the way they are skills sets and their tracks are put together but it’s basically false advertising then when they say they can make you job ready.”
How to use Datacamp effectively?
It might seem obvious but not all DataCamp subscribers use the platform effectively. Therefore, here are some tips to get the most out of it.
- Don’t start a few Datacamp courses at a time. This might lead to losing focus and quickly feeling overwhelmed.
- Set timeframes to finish the Datacamp course, Career track, a project, etc, and define clear skills you need to have after completing it. You can use DataCamp’s Assessments to check your progress.
- Make sure to find your own data-related project to implement learned skills. You should feel a strong need to improve your skills and be able to solve particular problems.
FAQ
DataCamp might work for different groups of customers but it is surely worth it for beginners who are just entering the field.
DataCamp is good to get the theoretical basis and skills but it totally depends on your additional practice and motivation to find a job.
You can use the platform for free and get access to the first chapters of the courses and a few projects. To join Datacamp for free, you just need to sign up with your email, choose the course, and enroll. However, you will have access to the introduction part only at no charge.
Yes, the company offers value for money and is able to teach you basics of R, Python, SQL or some narrower concepts.
While Datacamp certificates are not recognized, you can add them to your resume or Linkedin page as proof of skills.
Disclosure: Self-Starters team has not received any compensation from Datacamp or anyone else associated with the company. However, this review contains affiliate links, which means that, if you click & purchase from these links then, we will receive a small commission. This commission helps us to maintain this website. But you don’t pay anything extra.
