Comparative analysis of Study.Com & Straighterline

[Merlin]

Hi everyone. 
Those of you who have earned credits on Straighterline and/or Study.com, which one do you feel offers more quality content and more options to choose from? Also, from a price perspective, which one proves cheaper? Study.com has a 199 $/mo. College accelerator package that allows you to access unlimited courses and take 2 ACE approved exams during that period. Straighterline has a membership fee of 99 $/mo. and an additional fee of 59$ for every exam you take. So, it almost sums up to the same as Study.com. I would appreciate your inputs as I need to make a decision soon and settle for either of the two.

As with most things on this forum, the best option typically comes down to what is best for you based on your learning style.

Straighterline courses are mostly textbook driven, and more than half are open book and open notes on the final exam. Plus the final exam for most courses only represents 20-30% of the final grade. This allows some people to get through SL course material fairly quickly. Some people even disregard the assigned reading and just take the open book tests and look up answers as they go. But that risks not having enough time to complete exams since it takes time to look up answers in real-time during a test.

Study.com, on the other hand, doesn't offer open book exams, but they provide their own instructional material (video and text lessons) that is much less than what a traditional textbook would encompass and is tailored closely to what will be tested on in the final. Depending on the format of the course (whether it requires written papers or projects) the final exam represents either 33% of 67% of the final grade.

It is common to hear people say that you can get through courses quicker on Straighterline but you learn more on Study.com. Whether that is true or not depends a lot on how you move through a course.

Cost wise, it depends on how many courses you can get through in a month. If you're able to take 2-3 courses a month, Study.com is slightly cheaper (assuming no discounts). However, Straighterline is slightly less expensive overall. 

• Assuming you're taking the $59 courses at Straighterline, the price runs from $158 per course if you can only complete 1 course per month, to $78.80 per course, if you can complete 5 courses in a month. There are also discounts codes that can drop both the per course and first month subscription price quite a bit.
  
• At Study.com, the price runs from $199 per course if you can only complete 1 course per month, to $81.80 per course if you can complete 5 per month. Study.com used to have the Guardian scholarship which offered 6 free courses over 3 months, and there used to be a pre-paid discount plan as well which could drop the price down to $150/mo, but neither of those options are available any longer.
  

I took courses from both providers depending on the specific course, but I am taking the bulk of my courses from Study.com since I'm one of the of last few who got in on the $150/mo plan, and I prefer the format of the courses on Study.com.