The 10 Most Popular Udemy Instructors in 2026, Ranked by Student Reviews

Udemy has tens of thousands of instructors, and a few dozen of them account for a startling share of everything that gets bought. This is the list of the ten who have collected the most student reviews across the courses we track, and it doubles as a shortcut: if you are about to spend money on a Python, web development, AWS, Excel, data science or Java course and you have no idea who to trust, one of these ten teaches it, and their courses have been rated by hundreds of thousands of people before you.

Every figure on this page is live. The course counts, review totals, average ratings and “most reviewed” picks in the cards are calculated from our catalogue when the page loads and move with it, so what you see is current, not a number someone typed in months ago. Where an instructor publishes under two accounts (a personal one and a company one on the same courses), we count the courses once.

1. Jose Portilla

The most-reviewed instructor on Udemy is a mechanical engineer by training (BS and MS from Santa Clara University) who ended up teaching Python to the world. His Complete Python Bootcamp is the single most-reviewed course in our entire catalogue, and his SQL Bootcamp and Python for Data Science and Machine Learning course are not far behind. The style is lecture plus notebook: he explains, you code along in Jupyter, then you do the exercises. If you want one name for Python, SQL or data science fundamentals, this is it.

2. Maximilian Schwarzmüller

A freelance web developer from Germany who has been coding since he was twelve and now runs Academind, Max is the go-to instructor for JavaScript frameworks. His React and Angular guides are the most-reviewed courses on either topic, and he has a matching “Complete Guide” for Vue, Next.js, Flutter, Node and, lately, Power BI. He re-records when a framework changes, which is why his courses stay near the top of the JavaScript and web development rankings year after year. Expect long courses: his Angular guide alone runs past 50 hours.

3. 365 Careers

The one company on the list that is really a company: 365 Careers is a team, not a person, and it publishes across finance, business, data science and now AI. The Data Science Course (their complete bootcamp) is the flagship, followed by the Complete Financial Analyst Course and the Project Management course. The production is polished and the pace is brisk; students who want a lecturer’s personality sometimes find it impersonal, but for a structured path through finance or analytics it is hard to beat on breadth.

4. Stephane Maarek

If you are studying for an AWS certification, you have already heard of Stephane. An AWS Hero and a many-times-certified solutions architect, he owns the exam-prep space: the Solutions Architect Associate, Cloud Practitioner and Developer Associate courses are each among the most-reviewed courses on Udemy, and he pairs them with practice-exam packs. His second specialty is Apache Kafka, where his series is the standard reference. The courses are slide-driven and dense, built for passing the exam and then being useful at work. Start with our AWS page to see how his courses compare.

5. Dr. Angela Yu

Angela Yu gets into the top five with only a handful of courses, which tells you how big each one is. The lead instructor at the London App Brewery, she teaches two of the largest courses on the platform: the Complete Full-Stack Web Development Bootcamp and 100 Days of Code, the Python course built as one project a day for a hundred days. Her courses are the ones beginners finish: short lectures, a project after every module, and a lot of care spent on keeping people motivated. If you have never written code and want the gentlest serious start, choose her Python or web development course.

6. Kirill Eremenko

A former Deloitte analytics consultant with a physics and mathematics background, Kirill co-founded SuperDataScience and, with Hadelin de Ponteves, created the “A-Z” line: Machine Learning A-Z, Deep Learning A-Z, Tableau A-Z, R Programming A-Z and AI A-Z. Machine Learning A-Z is the most-reviewed machine learning course in our catalogue. The trademark is intuition first: every algorithm is explained with pictures and plain language before any code appears, which is why his courses work for people coming from business rather than computer science. Compare his courses on our data science and AI pages.

7. Kyle Pew

Kyle Pew’s Excel from Beginner to Advanced is, by a wide margin, the most-reviewed Excel course on Udemy, and it is the reason a Microsoft Certified Trainer with a past life as a game designer at Electronic Arts sits this high. Almost everything he publishes is Microsoft Office: Excel, Excel VBA and macros, Word, PowerPoint, Access, SharePoint. The courses are built one topic per short video, and they suit people who need to be competent at work by next week. See how they rank on our Excel and Office productivity pages.

8. Tim Buchalka’s Learn Programming Academy

Tim Buchalka has been a software developer for four decades, and his Java Masterclass is the most-reviewed Java course on the platform (and one of the longest anywhere, at well over a hundred hours). The Academy publishes his own courses in Java, Python, C++ and Android, plus courses by other working developers he recruits. The teaching is thorough to a fault: he takes his time, shows the mistakes, and does not skip the boring parts, which is exactly what some learners want and others find slow. Good for people who intend to get a job with the language rather than sample it.

9. Maven Analytics

Maven Analytics is the company behind Chris Dutton’s Excel courses and has grown into a data-skills platform of its own. On Udemy it is the name for business intelligence tooling: its Power BI Desktop course is the most-reviewed Power BI course we list, and the Excel line (advanced formulas, pivot tables, data visualization) is the natural next step after a beginner Excel course. The courses are project-based, using real-looking business datasets, and they are shorter and more focused than most on this list. Browse them on our data analysis page.

10. Colt Steele

Colt Steele ran in-person coding bootcamps (including Galvanize’s six-month immersive in San Francisco) before moving online, and it shows: The Web Developer Bootcamp is one of the two most-reviewed web development courses on Udemy (Angela Yu’s is the other), and as of September 2026 his courses carry the highest weighted rating of anyone in this top ten. His MySQL Bootcamp and Git and GitHub Bootcamp are the same recipe, applied to smaller topics: a teacher who is funny on purpose, plenty of exercises, and a curriculum that went through thousands of students in a classroom first. If you found other courses dry, start here; compare on our web development page.

How to use this list

Review counts measure popularity, not fit. A course with 500,000 reviews is a safe purchase, but it may still be the wrong one for you if it is 60 hours long and you needed a weekend, or if it is beginner-level and you are not. Open the instructor’s page, look at the individual courses’ lengths, ratings and last-update dates, and read a few of the written reviews (we show the real ones, good and bad). Udemy’s list prices are also mostly fiction: the courses on this page sell on discount most days of the year, and the price you see on our course pages is the current one.

Looking for a specific subject rather than a person? Our best Udemy courses roundup covers the top courses by topic, and every category page on the site (for example Python, web development or data science) ranks the courses in that subject with the same live data. The full instructors A-Z lists everyone we track.