The Best Online Coding Bootcamps

2021 couldn't be a better time to learn about a coding bootcamp. With most of the world now working remotely, more and more people - regardless of a background in engineering, tech or data science - are enrolling in coding boot camps all over the world. Travel is understandably limited as variants of the novel coronavirus continue to spread, and coding bootcamps experienced a staggering 30% growth in attendance in 2020.

As the U.S. and global job market stabilizes, many workers are looking to transition into careers that are higher-pay and lower stress for themselves and their families after a stressful year. That’s been anything but easy for both job seekers attempting to land a new role and employers who are (in this case) seeking software developers that understand programming fundamentals, algorithmic logic, and web frameworks.

Whether you’re someone who has an existing background in software development, a designer looking to pair programming with a design background to get into UX/UI, or just starting out on your coding journey, continuing your career success inevitably requires building new skills. The best online coding bootcamps train students to do this well. These schools understand that their value lies in teaching a lot of content quickly. In what’s typically 12-17 week intensives, coding bootcamps provide fully immersive, highly focused learning in a short amount of time.

That can come with trade-offs. It’s critical to know what those trade-offs are before jumping into a bootcamp in general, but let’s look at risks, rewards, preparation, and attributes of the best online coding bootcamps.

Pros and Cons of a Coding Bootcamp

Before we dive into the benefits of an online coding bootcamp, it’s important to understand the risks and rewards of attending an intensive coding school in general. Before you read through this section, take a mental inventory of your personal goals and events (which includes the goals of your partner and family), the value of your money and your time, and what success looks after you become a coding bootcamp grad.

Calculate the full investment and reward of a coding bootcamp. This is worth repeating again: The cost of a coding bootcamp is more than money. It’s time. In our conversations with software engineers, web developers, and others in the field, people underestimate the full investment needed to be successful. If you’re only factoring in the cost of attending a bootcamp without knowing the amount of hours you’re dedicating in and out of the classroom, you aren’t close to being able to make a decision.

Structured learning environments with other students. Holding yourself accountable is difficult for many learners in a distracting world. Not only are you carving out your own programming curriculum, but you also don’t have other programming students motivating you when faced with a difficult problem set or holding you accountable.

Costs are less than a four-year degree program. Many aspiring software engineers look at cost and testimonials (word-of-mouth referrals from boot camp grads) as a key reason for why they’re choosing a coding bootcamp. No surprise here. On average, a six-month coding bootcamp can be completed eight times faster and cost far less than a four-year computer science bachelor’s degree. However, this makes choosing a reputable online coding bootcamp mission critical, as their university degree counterparts are “vetted and accredited” each year.

Programming bootcamp alumni network. Alumni networks are always great resources to tap into, but as you advance in your career less and less people take advantage of them. We see the strengths and weaknesses of alumni networks in coding bootcamps similar to any other alumni network: Your individual ability to network will be key to making it work for you. Many coding bootcamps advertise big alumni numbers to entice applicants, but your ability to develop relationships with other students in an online coding bootcamp is fundamental.

Flexibility of learning in a full and part-time bootcamp curriculum. Coding bootcamps offer learning flexibility for two reasons. First, everyone learns differently. This is true regardless of whether the subject is liberal arts or logic-driven subjects like coding, data science, or database management. Second, your individual circumstance plays a substantial role in deciding whether to choose a full-time coding bootcamp or keep a full-time job while you complete a part-time coding bootcamp at a reduced pace.

Each of these factors needs to be evaluated in addition to a program’s core curriculum, and whether you want to broaden your knowledge or keep a narrow focus on a difficult topic. (Many coding bootcamps pair programming and web development with other courses in UX/UI and data security. How deep or broad you want to go is something you’ll want to consider, but recent bootcamp grads recommend a deeper focus for those without a computer science or software engineering background.)

The Online Coding Bootcamp: An Opportune Time

There’s no getting around it: After a global pandemic, the world experienced an uninvited (but educational) crash course in online living and working. Online coding bootcamps were a major beneficiary of the mass-adoption of digital solutions across industries.

That’s not a surprise. Coding bootcamp growth reached a tipping point in the mid-2010’s, and several of the key reasons career-switchers and long-time coding professionals invested in these programs are now being prioritized by the larger population. Self-paced learning and replayable courses were mainstays in the online bootcamp well before the ability to save and transcribe a meeting became a staple in the office. But what other factors are driving the substantial demand of learning programming online?

Online learning beat lockdowns. In-person coding courses were more affected by societal disruptions than remote learning. Minimizing exposure to the pandemic while completing, for example, a full-stack programming curriculum was a key benefit for those who enrolled last year. Regardless of how quickly we get back, it brought the online bootcamp firmly into the mainstream which should continue over the next ten years.

Flexibility. Once the world returns to a pre-pandemic normal, our new ways of living and working won’t be going away. Online bootcamps allow the flexibility to learn database management from a coffee shop or collaborate on your capstone project from your in-laws. As the world eventually opens back up, an online coding bootcamp provides students with flexible learning options, and easy retrieval of curriculum review and course material.

Reduced overhead for the coding school. There are always necessary costs like rent, electricity, and desks for on-ground programs. (No one wants to sit on the floor and learn Python syntax.) An online bootcamp option doesn’t factor in those costs. Less overhead for online bootcamps can mean more efficiency and lower costs for an aspiring web developer.

How Online Coding Bootcamps Prepare You for a Coding Job

An online coding bootcamp certainly can prepare you for careers in software and web development, though it’s important to cut through the marketing jargon to get to the actual benefits of investing your time and money over the next 3-6 months.

First, know that the most important thing a coding bootcamp graduate leaves with is a portfolio of work. Showing an employer that you not only understand client-side and server-side web development, but also that you’ve built and are continuing to build applications is a huge benefit. There’s a difference between discussing web development and showcasing an app you developed and debugged in PHP and React.

We’ll return to this at the end due to its importance, but there are several ways an online coding bootcamp gets you ready for your first (or a more advanced) job as a software developer, data scientist, or UX design professional.

• Intensive Immersion into Front-end and back-end development. With the world spending more time streaming, online shopping, and sharing than ever before, companies are looking for coders who can make beautiful applications with HTML5 and CSS while swiftly loading content from PHP or SQL databases. “Deep” immersion in your coding bootcamp might even be an understatement: Most full-time coding bootcamps can run from 9 am - 6 pm and include homework.
  
  As you focus on the fundamentals and improve your coding skill in the earlier weeks of a course, you’re also preparing to contribute to individual coding projects, group projects, and a final capstone project in later phases of a coding bootcamp curriculum.
• Networking with other students in your online course. You’ll be working together learning and coding projects for at least ten hours a day so networking and building relationships as friends and future colleagues is a natural benefit of an online coding bootcamp.
• Show off your coding skill with a portfolio. Ready to spend a lot of time in Github? Learn it and love it. Other than the team and capstone projects you worked on in your online coding boot camp, hiring managers looking for a software engineer or web developer will want to see what you’re building and shipping now. Thinking like a recruiter and understanding how they’ll analyze and test your coding ability prior to interview will help shape what projects you feature. Include projects that show a fluency in the programming language they’re looking for in the job description.

Costs & Financing for an Online Coding Bootcamp

If you don't have the means to immediately pay for the full tuition of an online boot camp, payment plans, private loans and revenue sharing exist as an alternative to up-front, out-of-pocket tuition. Let's talk about a few of the options because that's going to have an effect on your decision to attend one of these coding schools.

Self-financing and paying full bootcamp tuition up front. Not everyone has an average of 15 to 18k, sitting around. However if you’ve budgeted for this, this is typically where your full tuition will cost the least. After determining that enrolling in an online course is a good investment for you and your family, you can begin the vetting and application process.

Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs). Next is income sharing agreements, or what you'll see the coding bootcamps refer to as ISA’s. Some online bootcamp students really like this because it will alleviate the pressure of having to pay a large upfront cost. The tradeoff is that you’ll pay the coding bootcamp a percentage of your total annual income for the next few years.

A hidden advantage of ISAs is that it forces you to calculate how much you will need to be paid per year in order to be able to live, commute, pay back your tuition, and save. Pay careful attention to the minimum salary you need to make before an ISA kicks in and that you don’t accept a web development job for too low of a salary. If your agreement stipulates that you must pay back the online coding bootcamp if you land a job making above 35-40k per year, that doesn’t leave you much room for living expenses. (The good news: The average salary for even an entry-level programmer is $50,000 per year, but those of you in high cost-of-living cities should be doing the math closely.)

The upside is that ISAs hedges your risk if you have a hard time finding a job in a really tough market. The downside is that paying a percentage of your total income for the next few years is going to be a slightly higher fee for tuition, versus paying the upfront cost.

Payment plans

Private loan. There are limited federal loans for coding bootcamps. There are, however, some private loans available for coding bootcamp students; however, it's worth reviewing them very closely to make sure that they make sense for you financially. A wide range of programs exist for different credit scores, but consulting a financial advisor prior to taking out a loan for a programming bootcamp is a must.

Ascent Funding.Ascent Funding is a popular bootcamp loan provider formed from a merger of Skills Fund and Ascent Student Loans. They offer scholarships, bootcamp loans, and private loans to students attending bootcamps that they consider to be committed to their long-term success. In their own words, they’re committed to doing their “absolute best to ensure we’re only partnering with schools that deliver a tangible “Return On Education.”

Climb Credit. Another popular online coding bootcamp loan option is from Climb Credit. As of the time of publication, their interest rates start at 6.5% and have no penalty for repaying your bootcamp loan early. As with any loan, sitting with a financial planner or calculating your costs are a must.

Structured vs. Self-Paced Online Coding Bootcamps

Many people interested in learning to code are natural self-starters who look into self-paced bootcamps or online training courses. A large reason self-paced online courses like Udemy, and Codeacademy scaled so quickly is due to their low cost. Since you’ll learn coding on your own and use a self-directed curriculum, the investment needed for course instructors and to facilitate an online classroom is minimal. Learning asynchronously allows you to spend the time you need mastering a concept without a class moving onto the next topic before you’re ready.

The main trade-off - and it’s a big one - is structure: Starting a coding education is easy, but holding yourself accountable to both the education and the project is extraordinarily challenging. Free or annual subscription options rarely come with instructors. Furthermore, you won’t be integrated into a cohort of other students who will motivate and partner with you on a coding project.

How to Determine Which Online Coding Bootcamp Is Right for You

Searching for, narrowing down, and ultimately signing up for an online coding bootcamp is easy if you have an idea of what you’re looking for. Best Coding Bootcamps allows you to filter through our detailed database of coding bootcamp locations, costs, program types, program lengths, and more. Let’s look at some of the most common searches our students perform before signing up and getting matched to a bootcamp.

Programming language. If you know which programming language you’re most interested in learning, you can find which bootcamps teach them as part of the course curriculum. Full-stack developers will naturally have exposure to many front-end and back-end programming languages, but let’s say your dream job is working at Facebook. A software engineer at Facebook would want to be well-versed in Javascript, PHP, and MySQL. However if you’re not sure where to start, most of the online coding bootcamps will teach you to highly popular programming languages to start.

Job placement. Many online coding bootcamps offer job placement assistance after becoming a boot camp grad. The success of job placement programs is a mixed bag, largely because the statistics for the effectiveness of these programs are self-reported, but you can see which of the boot camps offer the service to anyone in the process of completing their online course.

Job guarantee. Some students look for bootcamps that guarantee a job as a software developer (or related field) following the completion of their coursework. We recommend taking these self-reported numbers with a grain of salt and interviewing recent graduates of coding bootcamps on their job placement experience after they completed the online course curriculum.

Full-time or part-time. Everyone’s schedule is different. You can search for an online coding school that offers full-time immersion or a longer part-time course depending on what pace you want to go. Most online bootcamps are flexible.

Courses. The first step in your journey toward becoming a web developer, software developer, or data scientist is thinking about what field you want to focus on. You can search for boot camps that offer full-stack web development, front-end development, and back-end development. Or perhaps you’d rather pursue data science. For the design-minded and creatives who want to transition into UX/UI, that’s also an option.

These attributes are some of the many factors prospective students weigh before deciding to ultimately choose to become a web developer.

Best Online Coding Bootcamps

These five schools are our top choices of some of the best online coding bootcamps in 2021. They show a good mix of programming fundamentals, corporate partners, and were the most transparent on the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR).