Data · SQL · Excel · AI — for people learning it
The certificate is cheap. Your pace is what costs money.
| Row | Route | Spreadsheets | SQL | Python | Machine learning | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Data Analytics9-course series, Coursera$49/month | Spreadsheets: named | SQL: named | Python: named | Machine learning: not named | $49/month | |
| IBM Data Science12-course series, Coursera$49/month | Spreadsheets: not named | SQL: named | Python: named | Machine learning: named | $49/month | |
| Machine Learning Specialization3 courses, DeepLearning.AI + Stanford Online$49/month | Spreadsheets: not named | SQL: not named | Python: not named | Machine learning: named | $49/month | |
| The free routesfreeCodeCamp, SQLBolt, Microsoft's own Excel pages$0 | Spreadsheets: named | SQL: named | Python: named | Machine learning: named | $0 |
Data and AI training is mostly sold by the month, so the advertised number is not the price — your own speed is. Rowcount reads the seller's page, writes down the date, and works out what each route actually costs someone who finishes it.
Three places to start
Which analytics certificate, and what it really costs
Four routes priced on the day, the syllabus each one publishes, and the question to ask before you start the trial.
Column BAI courses that teach something
What the big AI programmes contain, how long they claim to take, and why almost none of them is a certification.
Column CThe routes that cost nothing
freeCodeCamp, SQLBolt and Microsoft's own pages cover all four core skills for nothing, and pay this site nothing.
Why a monthly price changes the whole question
When a course is billed monthly, two people can pay very different amounts for the same certificate, and the difference is not quality — it is calendar. Coursera's page for the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate states a pace of six months at ten hours a week and a price of $49/month in the US and Canada after a seven-day free trial, read on 24 September 2026. Six months at that rate is $294, which is why Coursera's own page says finishing typically costs less than $300.
That is the arithmetic every page here starts from. It is also why the honest comparison is not "which certificate is best" but "what does each route cost me at the pace its own publisher says it takes" — a question with a checkable answer, unlike most of what gets written about these products.
What this site will not tell you
It will not tell you what you will earn, how likely you are to be hired, or how many people finish. Not because those questions do not matter — they are usually the only reason anyone is shopping — but because no certifying body and no US government source publishes reliable figures for these specific products. The numbers that circulate come from the companies selling the training, and an unaudited vendor survey dressed as a statistic is worse than no number at all.
What can be checked, and therefore what is here: the syllabus each publisher prints, the tools it names, the price with the day it was read, what the subscription renews at, and whether a free route teaches the same thing. Six of those go into how every score on this site is weighted.
The free routes are real, and they pay us nothing
There is a free path through all four core skills, and it is not a consolation prize. freeCodeCamp is a 501(c)(3) public charity whose own page states that every part of it is free — "the courses, the projects, even the certifications" — and its eleven certifications include Relational Databases, Data Analysis with Python and Machine Learning with Python. SQLBolt teaches SQL through interactive lessons in the browser. Microsoft publishes its own Excel training and complete function reference at no charge.
None of those has an affiliate programme, so the whole $0 column earns this site nothing. They are named first anyway, on the page about free AI courses and everywhere else they are the right answer, because a site that only mentions what it is paid to mention is not worth reading.
Where to start
If you are choosing a data analytics programme, the comparison of the four routes at their own stated pace is the page to read: it prices each one and says what its syllabus actually names. If you are looking at AI specifically, the AI courses page explains why almost nothing sold as an "AI certification" is one. And if you just want to learn SQL, the guide to learning it starts with the free route.
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