Alison review: free online courses with paid CPD certificates and diplomas

Prices appear in your local currency, so a US visitor sees dollars at checkout, and some courses vary. On October 30, 2026, a Halloween banner offered 25% off certificates and diplomas.

Premium has one feature worth understanding: each month you’re subscribed adds a 10% certificate discount, up to 50%, and those discounts don’t expire when you cancel. Five months of Premium at €7.99 costs about €40. If you plan to buy three or four certificates in that time, it can pay for itself; for one certificate, it doesn’t.

You pick a course, say a three-hour certificate in workplace health and safety, and start on your phone during lunch. There’s an app for offline lessons, so the train ride home works too. Courses are self-paced and you can stop and pick up where you left off. To pass, you need 70% on beginner certificate assessments and 80% on everything else. Your completed courses appear in a Learner Record on your dashboard, which you can share even if you never buy the certificate.

The free version shows ads. They’re the price of free, and Premium removes them.

Alison sorts its courses into two types. Certificate courses are short and focused on one topic, often two or three hours; the accreditation page gave Caring for Ageing Parents as an example. Diplomas cover a whole subject and run longer, roughly 6 to 15 hours, like the Diploma in Caregiving or the Dementia Diploma. If the goal is a line on your résumé, a diploma shows more effort for not much more money. If you just need one skill for Monday, a certificate course is enough, and you may not need to buy anything at all.

Treat Alison like a free library with a gift shop at the exit. Take two or three courses in the area you’re curious about, without paying. Keep the one that held your attention, go deeper with its diploma, and buy only that certificate, ideally during a sale or after a few months of Premium discounts. Then add it to LinkedIn, which the certification page encourages, alongside a short line about what you can now do.

Alison’s publishing process is accredited by the CPD Certification Service in the UK, which means its courses meet standards for continuing professional development. That’s real, and it’s useful if you need CPD hours. But it’s not college credit, not a license, and not an industry certification like CompTIA or a state-approved course. A US hiring manager will see “Alison Certificate” and judge it by what you can do, not by the paper.

The other catch is price visibility. On Trustpilot, the most common complaint is that the certificate fee only becomes clear once the course is done. The platform is generous before that point, and then asks for money. Know it in advance and it stops being a surprise.

Course quality varies too. Some areas are built with partners, like dementia courses reviewed against Alzheimer’s Disease International’s standards, but most courses come from Alison’s network of course creators, and depth ranges from solid to thin. Check the estimated hours and the module list before you start.

On October 16, 2026, Alison had 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 58,340 reviews. Reading through them, praise centers on free access and the range of subjects; complaints center on certificate prices and support for free users.

People on a tight budget who want to test a subject before paying for anything, jobseekers adding short skills to a résumé, care and support workers who need CPD hours, and anyone curious who wants to learn without a subscription.

If the credential matters, choose a platform whose certificates come from the institution that built the course. Coursera Plus costs $399 a year with certificates from universities and companies. edX lets you audit many university courses for free and charges for verified certificates, which is the closest model to Alison’s. If you want an in-depth course from a single instructor, Udemy has more choice, though its certificates aren’t accredited either.

Compare 15 platforms side by side in our online course platforms ranking, and see Coursera vs Udemy for the subscription-versus-single-course question.

Search Alison for the one skill from the job ad that’s bothering you, open the course page and check its level, hours and whether it’s a certificate or a diploma. Take the course for free. When you finish, look at the certificate price at checkout and ask yourself whether your Learner Record already says enough.