CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight: Which is Right For You?

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David Borgogni

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David Borgogni has a love for digital marketing, learning, and creating helpful content. He went to school at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and after his extensive career in digital marketing for the solar industry, he turned his attention to digital marketing and helping other companies grow their businesses.

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2222The world is quickly becoming governed by digital. Nearly everything is moving online nowadays, and with this comes a huge influx of knowledge being shared. With some professionals, and even students, time is of the essence, and they may not have the time to go to a classroom for lessons. More and more of them are turning to online learning, and in particular, to platforms like CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight for learning new skills and obtaining new knowledge.

So if you’re looking to learn some new skills, which one should you go for? We’ll take a deep dive into each of the platforms and explain some of the key features between CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight.

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of the key features of each platform, let’s have a look at the main differences between CBT Nuggets and Pluralsight.

Main Differences Between CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight

The main differences between CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight are:

• CBT Nuggets is an on-demand platform, which can make it difficult to carve out time for learning, whereas Pluralsight has a more relaxed attitude to learning and using their software.
• CBT Nuggets has a smaller selection of courses you can do, whereas Pluralsight has a wide range of different courses
• CBT Nuggets has a more video-based learning system in place, whereas Pluralsight has more document-based learning, with minimal video lessons
• CBT Nuggets has longer and more in-depth video lessons, which give you more information, whereas Pluralsight has shorter lessons, making it easier for those who want quick information bites. 
• CBT Nuggets has labs in addition to their video lessons, whereas you’re encouraged to do your own research with Pluralsight
• CBT Nuggets has a live chat setting along with other tools at your disposal, should you need help with anything to do with their software, whereas Pluralsight doesn’t have very concise customer services
• CBT Nuggets is quite clearly laid out, whereas Pluralsight has all their lessons in one long list which can be difficult to maneuver
• Pluralsight offers courses that are supplied by industry professionals, whereas CBT Nuggets doesn’t have the same consistency.

CBT Nuggets – In Depth

Founded in 1999, CBT Nuggets is short for ‘Computer-Based Training’ and is renowned for providing meaningful and informative online training focusing primarily in IT, office productivity and project management. Online streaming videos is how they teach their lessons and you can access any of their videos at any hour of the day or night, seven days a week.

Their videos are available on both computers and on mobile devices, so you can also access their learning programs while on the move. 

Check out some of the best CBT Nuggets alternatives.

Let’s take a look at some of CBT Nuggets main features:

• Virtual labs
• App & Offline learning
• Coaching and bespoke quizzes
• Personal trainers
• Certificates of completion
• IT practice exams
• Usage reporting
• Playlists for your learning
• Learner management

Getting Started

If you reckon that CBT Nuggets is the one for you, then you’ll be presented with this screen. This is the centralized hub where you can basically select which particular IT training you are looking to complete using CBT Nuggets.

As you can clearly see, there are a wide range of courses for you to choose from, as well as an almost inexhaustible amount of videos that you can engage with for your training.

What’s worth noting is that all the content you can access on CBT Nuggets is created by them and them alone – they do not outsource or use third parties. This gives the lessons that you take with CBT Nuggets a more formal classroom feel, with a whiteboard and a teacher taking you through everything.

Vendors

Next up, you’ll get an extensive list of vendors that you can choose from, with bespoke training affiliated with each one. We’ll take you through the different vendors that are on offer.

AWS – Amazon Web Services

CBT Nuggets offers a whopping 17 different courses involving Amazon Web Services training, with 2,144 videos on offer for learning purposes, and 243 hours of training. As Amazon Web Services has somewhat taken the world by storm in the past few years, learning the intricacies and ins and outs of Amazon is essential for any company.

Check Point

One of the leading providers of IT security hardware, Check Point may be small but knowledge about their systems can be extremely valuable.

Find out all about defending against network threats and monitor network activities using CBT Nuggets, who may only offer 1 course consisting of 6 hours of training, but will leave you in a great position to apply and utilize Check Point in any role you might enter.

Cisco

The undisputed global leader in routing and switching hardware and software, CBT Nuggets offers up 50 different Cisco courses comprising 801 hours of teaching – quite a lot to get through! As a network professional, it’s unlikely that you wouldn’t encounter Cisco’s equipment, and the training offered on CBT Nuggets can also validate your core networking skills and knowledge.

Citrix

Citrix is a leading visualization provider, which, despite being quite simple and easy to maintain, requires specific training and troubleshooting. As more people move towards cloud-based storage systems, virtualization skills are in higher demand than ever.

With 13 hours of training videos spread across 2 courses, CBT Nuggets is a great starting point if you want to hone your Citrix skills and knowledge.

CompTIA

CBT Nuggets’ CompTIA training is vendor-neutral, meaning that it is universally applicable to any product out there. If you’re new to IT, then CompTIA certifications are incredibly useful. Foundational knowledge for a wide variety of IT roles include desktop support, network, and cloud administration are just some of the things you can learn across the 11 courses offered by CBT Nuggets.

F5

From network traffic management to application development, F5 networks training on CBT Nuggets is a great investment for network administrators and engineers. It’s pretty quick to complete too, with 8 hours of videos in just one main course.

Juniper

While slightly smaller than some other major players, Juniper do have a big influence among ISPs. Training on CBT Nuggets is pretty concise and covers quite a lot of ground, with 71 hours of training videos across 18 different courses. These courses will prepare professionals in a range of core networking skills.

Linux

110 hours of training in 4 different courses will offer you a great base in this popular open-source operating system. Training in Linux is incredibly useful for prospective employees, so CBT Nuggets is a great place to get a crash course in Linux.

Microsoft

Microsoft surely needs no introduction. Because of its ubiquity, everyone will be able to benefit from the thousands of hours of videos across 100 different courses that you can find on the CBT Nuggets site.

Oracle

You can find Oracle’s systems in businesses of all shapes and sizes, so getting your administration training from CBT Nuggets can be really useful for any prospective employers.

Oracle database administrators have to know how to access and properly store data in the Oracle databases – and then troubleshoot these if any issues arise. CBT Nuggets offers up 3 different courses with 24 hours of video lessons for you to properly come to grips with Oracle.

Salesforce

This piece of software allows organizations to build relationships with customers and identify potentially strong leads. And with different versions, Classic and Lightning, you’ll want to keep up to date with both. There’s no better place to keep on top of the ins and outs with Salesforce than using the 2 courses available on CBT Nuggets.

VMware

And finally, CBT Nuggets offers you an incredible 102 hours of training videos across 8 different courses, helping you professionalize your knowledge in their virtualization softwares and services that VMware offers. Training in VMware is very useful for a wide range of IT professionals – from systems administrators all the way through to mobility administrators.

Virtual Labs

Being an IT professional requires more than just knowing the terms and concepts, so having these virtual labs, where you can put into real-world practice everything that you have learnt, is essential. CBT Nuggets offers the user a series of virtual labs in conjunction with the video lessons.

These provide you with a series of sandbox environments that are perfect for honing your skills and don’t require you to purchase any expensive equipment, or potentially disrupt any live production environments.

To access the virtual labs, go to the launch pad where you started your video. You should be able to see and access your virtual lab from there, which opens in a new screen, meaning you can continue the lesson while putting it into practice.

Practice exams & quizzes

There’s no better way to put your knowledge to the test by getting stuck in an exam. CBT Nuggets uses Kaplan IT Training Practice Exams, which are customizable, and offer up questions that are as close to the real questions you might get in proper exams and tests.

Besides this, they use flashcard training to hone your knowledge of all the key terms – and if you’re familiar with IT work, you’ll know that there are a great many to remember! They also give you in-depth answers to any questions you fail to get correct.

You can also take part in their quizzes as you learn – slightly lower stakes than the Kaplan exams. The quiz will pause the video, and once you’ve answered the question, the video lesson will resume.

Learner community

One extra feature that CBT Nuggets offers is a learner community page. Here, you can connect with other learners as well as get involved in lots of other handy channels, such as channels dedicated to mentoring and career advice.

Using Slack, you can learn collaboratively, stay informed with news on the latest information and new courses, and get answers to any questions you might have too.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing for CBT Nuggets, there are two different price brackets. For an individual account, the monthly cost is $59 and for an annual membership, it will cost you $599. Both of these options come with a free trial week where you can see how you get on with CBT Nuggets.

With the Team membership, it will set you back the same amount for the Individual option – that’s a total of $59 a month or $599 a year.

Interface and Customer Support

CBT Nuggets’ interface is really slick and cleanly laid out, meaning that you can move around the site or the app with ease. Lots of things are clearly labeled, so you can find where you want to go quickly, and there’s so much support and directions available – not just from the site layout but also the whole CBT Nuggets community.

If you’re still stuck, you can head over to the Help Center section of their website, where you can search for the topic you’re looking for help with, or choose from one of their topic pages.

Each topic page offers up a list of questions and tips like you can see above, meaning it is really easy to find out exactly what you need a hand with. If you can’t find what you’re looking for here, then you can get in touch with them in several different ways – from phone to live chat to email.

Are there any Alternatives to CBT Nuggets?

If you don’t think that CBT Nuggets is for you, you can check out these alternatives:

• LinkedIn Learning – with effective and compassionate tuition, LinkedIn Learning offers a series of courses with a business focus
• SkillSoft – with nearly 200,000 different courses on offer, in 29 different languages and complete offline/cloud-based access 24/7, SkillSoft is one of the innovators in e-learning
• Plantoost – an online learning and teaching site where everything is free! You can also lead your own course if you have the expertise.

Pluralsight – In Depth

Founded in 2004, Pluralsight wasn’t necessarily set up as an online training platform. It was used originally for providing courses to classrooms, but soon turned its attention to giving online training to those who wanted it. With nearly a million students and nearly 10,000 different courses to choose from, Pluralsight has everything that the professional client might be looking for.

So what else does Pluralsight offer? Let’s take a look:

• Huge amounts of courses to choose from
• Convenient online assessments
• Partnerships with companies like Microsoft that gives huge amounts of credibility
• Advanced course pathways, meaning the journey to the end is clear and concise
• Self-paced video lectures
• Certificate of completion at the end of every course
• Students can measure their skills with each other

Getting started

First and foremost, you need to input your details as you subscribe, and then select the interests that you want to learn from. All these choices are based on applications. You can come back and do this later on if you haven’t made your choice yet.

You’ll then be confronted by the dashboard which, at first glance, is quite overwhelming. It may look really technical and confusing, but what you should do is make sure you know which sort of ‘path’ you want to take.

Another great compatibility feature of Pluralsight is that you can access your learning either via your desktop computer, or if you’re on the move, via their bespoke mobile app, which can work with both Android and iPhone systems.

Having the skills you want to brush up on in mind before charging into your Pluralsight course can really help you – and make the dashboard a little bit easier to make sense of!

Choosing your path

Once you click on whichever path you want, you’ll see what sort of skills and training you might need to follow that particular path. To find out what sort of level you are at, you can take part in a test to find out how skilled you are in your selected path.

The tests look a little like this image above, and as you can see, you only have a set amount of time to complete the test. By completing a test for finding out your level will also show you the recommended steps you should take for your path.

Each path consists of different courses, and you can see how many hours worth of tuition you need to partake in to complete the course, and, eventually, the path.

Courses

As we mentioned earlier, there are several thousand courses for you to take part in, so make sure you know what you want to do beforehand. Each course is made up of videos that vary in length and are headed up by an expert in that particular field. There are 10 different course categories that you can choose from. These are:

• Software Development
• IT ops
• Manufacturing and Design
• Cloud Computing
• Machine Learning
• Business Professional
• Creative Professional
• Architecture and Construction
• Information and Cybersecurity

New content is added really regularly, with Pluralsight keeping up to date with all the new and changing technologies, so you’ll likely see courses and paths change around quite regularly as the industry changes.

The courses are pretty easy to follow, and you can take notes by using the notes tab on the right-hand side of the screen. And you can easily browse whichever ones you might want to do by either searching for the author, or for the particular topic that you want to delve into.

You can also get involved in an interactive course that gives you tasks and tests on the fly as you learn, which can be a great way of learning. You can also access detailed feedback on your progress from your tutors, and get some good hands-on experience, applying your knowledge to simulations of real-world situations.

With every course you manage to successfully complete, you’ll be awarded a certificate of completion too. This can encourage you to further your knowledge and learn more, and even continue with some of the other courses to improve your level. If you don’t pass, however, don’t worry – you can retake the course as many times as you need to for the information to set in.

Team learning

One of the really great features of Pluralsight is the team learning feature. This makes it really feel like a proper classroom, and you can discuss anything you might be confused by in your course with your virtual classmates.

Another feature that Pluralsight offers is the ability to see how your classmates are getting on. You can scroll through the list of the team involved in your course and click on any name that pops up to see how they’ve been getting on. It also shows you their skill level in the courses that they’ve completed too, so adds a sort of competitive atmosphere to your learning.

Pricing

So how much will Pluralsight set you back? Well, it all depends on what sort of subscription you’re wanting to get. They offer Skills and Flow subscriptions, which both have different pricing options.

For their Skills subscription, which is more geared towards team learning, it’ll set you back $579 a year for the Professional subscription, or $779 for the Enterprise subscription. If you go for the Personal option, however, it will cost $29 a month, or $179 a year.

With the Flow subscription, they’ve got three different options. For the Standard subscription, it costs $499 a year. For the Plus subscription, it will cost $599 a year. And for Enterprise, it’s $699 a year.

Interface and Customer Support

The website and the app are both really well laid out, and it looks really slick and it is easy to navigate around the website. All the tabs on the website and the app are clearly labeled, meaning you can navigate through your learning experience in quite a straightforward manner.

When it comes down to their customer support network, they have a dedicated Help Center section of their website which has really evident and obvious sections depending on what you might need help with. They also have several ways of contacting them if you need additional help.

Are there any Alternatives to Pluralsight?

Don’t think Pluralsight is for you? Not to worry. Here are some great alternatives:

• Udemy – Udemy lets you seize the opportunity to learn a new skill, change profession or simply advance your career using their many different courses (see our Udemy vs Pluralsight comparison)
• SkillShare – a non-accredited e-learning site (see our Skillshare vs Pluralsight comparison) that uses completion of a proper project over standard lecturing.
• Lynda – another great portal for a whole host of online courses, Lynda is a great alternative to Pluralsight (see our Lynda vs Pluralsight article)

Frequently Asked Questions

Still, need some more answers? We’ll go through some of the more frequently asked questions about CBT Nuggets and Pluralsight:

CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight – the Final Verdict

So which one is better? Let’s break it all down.

• Lessons: The videos featured on CBT Nuggets are really great and concise – however you can’t make quick and easy notes, so with the lessons, Pluralsight takes the biscuit
• Testing: Pluralsight has much better testing systems in place, giving you detailed feedback about each of your answers
• Prices: CBT Nuggets is much more expensive than Pluralsight in the long run, so if you’re pinching those pennies, you’ll want to go for Pluralsight
• Interface: Both CBT Nuggets and Pluralsight have really good, clear and slick interfaces, but CBT Nuggets is slightly easier to navigate, and the color scheme is more approachable

So when it comes down to CBT Nuggets vs Pluralsight, which one is better? In our opinion, we rate Pluralsight as the one to go for.

It has more courses available to you, is cheaper in the long run, and has a really advanced learning system in place that can make you a professional really quickly. Plus, the added certificates of completion can be shown to prospective employers to show how you excelled in these fields.

So if you’re looking to brush up on some old skills, or learn some new ones, then head on over to Pluralsight for all your technology needs.