A Cloud Guru Reviews 195

Run, don't walk away from this company. Refuses to contact me regarding an invoice. Nearly three months and all I hear is that someone will get back with me. It is always someone different. Do yourself a favor and save your money.

There are little to no practical examples compared to other certification training providers and it feels like the tutors are not really adding any additional value, they simply read off of the PowerPoint slides. It's like you're bored with hundreds of facts you need to memorize to pass the exam, instead of actually learning something and taking the exam as proof of what you've learned.

I can't even go through a 3 minutes guide successfully. I do a lot of stuff with my network without any network problems, but the moment I login to the site, it takes me almost 30 munities to watch a 3 minutes tutorial because I get network problems "learn.acloud.guru’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem." and need to diagnose and refresh the page all the time. The lab is even worse, the one hour time will even expire without me finishing a 15 minute task.

Cr*p outdated content, exceptionally expensive, no trial, no refund.

Scam

The courses are not updated with latest content, practice tests are useless and not good enough for real exam. User forums or on other support channels, no one address to your question, basically no replies at all except automated replies.
Rather buying ACloudGuru subscription, I would recommend to search for better alternate.

It seems the new wave of politically correct madness has infected this company too, as an insult to every customer with normal intelligence. Energy is spent renaming technical concepts but not updating stale and, frankly, useless content, past the beginner level.

The courses are not updated with the latest content and the hands-on /demo labs are old and are not as per the latest AWS UI.
The support team has no idea on when the labs will be updated.
I am going through the Machine Learning Specialty Certification and the course and lab is not updated as per the latest UI
The Cloud Playground(sandboxes) have a lot of restrictions and even the suggested hand-on labs/demos don't work on their playground.

If someone is thinking to buying a subscription of Acloudguru personal plus, I would suggest to go with online free tutorials and UDEMY practice exams and the amount they charge for the personal plus you can create a free-tier AWS account and pay the same amount with zero restriction and better practice.

We have a business account with ACG. Our company is growing exponentially. Recently we've had lots of new joiners. None of them is receiving an invitation email from the cloud guru platform.
Can this please be sorted ASAP and email invites are re-triggered for all the new users under our account's list with 'pending' status. Frustratingly, there is no other way of adding them to the account except for sending the non-working email invite.

I was on acloudguru years ago and it was pretty good. Recently, my employer pays for the sub so I figured why not use it. As others have stated the courses are hit or miss. MANY questions on the forums are years old with no answers. There's not even basic functionality like "bookmark this course" so you can find it easy later on.

Evidently Pluralsight acquired acloudguru in July 2021 and interestingly enough if you look through the reviews here, someone from ACG was responding up until end of May so my suspicion is the ACG platform is basically abandoned and the content will likely be moving over the Pluralsight, which as a platform is not great either and is plagued by outdated content so i guess them and ACG are a good match.

The site is just cluttered with old content that you reall can't tell you dealing with outdated information (Note most everything is outdated though some is more than others) Here is an example:

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C02)
vs
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02
On is a year out of date while the other is Three years out of date. Why is an outdated course even available for a new learner to select.

I purchased it 5 days ago and I couldn't get access to the paid membership!

The customer service told me that there was a server outage of AWS, and they are not responsible for that! They lied to me that they have fixed it within 8 hours, but then I checked on several review sites and many other people are experiencing the same problem as I do.

Terrible CS!

Sent and opened 3 tickets all I was received was that they where getting a large number of calls and due to Covid (Yea Right) they would apology and get back soon. Now all I get today is log on to my Account and take FREE courses after I spent $218 for 1 year unlimited access. All is done by Internet but as Monday I will be filling a compliant with BBB, Attorney General of Texas, and any other regulatory identity that is appropriate. All they have to do is call my telephone number and give me the access that I am supposed to have (unlimited) for the remainder of my term or / and Refund my money. Very simple. But I will not renew based on the service and product cost. There are a lot of other online and vendor training online with access to Portals and Sand Boxes and Labs. We will see how this goes but I am putting out the facts. I have all Emails and Invoices to back up what I detailed here.

The refund policy says it all. You pay anything to them, you're not getting it back whether you're a satisfied customer or not. This reminded me with low-end used car dealers, if you drive the car off the lot and it blows up one minute later, it's your problem. Very scammy.

I'm a former LinuxAcademy customer who got caught up in the acquisition by A Cloud Guru, now PluralSight. My subscription ended yesterday. I attempted to cancel my subscription due to dissatisfaction with the overall experience. I encountered a system error during the downgrade process, then upon refreshing, I noticed I had been forced into a renewal by their billing system for 1 more year. I also received an unauthorized charge with tax included for a state that I no longer reside in. Are you supposed to be collecting taxes for online e-learning subscriptions (seems questionable)? I reached out to their support yesterday and today with nothing but automated responses. I'm beyond disappointed and still waiting for help from an actual support person.

Update: I finally heard back from support and thankfully they were able to cancel the subscription, refund the renewal charge, and stop the auto-renewal.

I was with Linux Academy and happy with that, after the ACG acquisition, most certification courses have been left outdated, not worth my money anymore.
And now with the acquisition from Pluralsight, I don't see a future (in term of costs) for customers.
I terminated my membership.

Overall ACG has gone downhill, in terms of its content, it has become outdated. Recently refreshed courses for GCP exclude case studies. For example, the Data Architect course refreshed in 2021, lacks case studies from 2021 and includes case studies no longer in the examination.

Help pages are outdated, for example one page indicates if you require an invoice details to be changed, it can be reissued. Recently that is no longer the case since taxation happens based on country (though their system still seemed to cache my old address despite being updated).

Any complaints are met with the standard phrases like "We appreciate you pointing out.., We apologize," Replies can take a couple of days sometimes.

I said if they could not resolve an issue, I would like to cancel. Their response, "Do you mind clarifying if you would like to schedule a cancellation for the end of your billing cycle or cancel your subscription immediately?". No attempt to resolve the situation because they lack the resources to do so. Also from a customer point of view this person is offering to. cancel straight away, or when the time you have paid for ends. So, the choice is to not be able to use time you have paid for... or to be able to use it? Literally no perspective from the customers point of view. I was always polite yet its pretty clear they don't value customers, answers could be the same from a script.

Since being purchased by ACG, Linux Academy has gone downhill and being purchased by PluralSight only seems to have made their system and customer service worse.

Only one positive is that they did make a sandbox area last year, which can be useful, but in reality you can get experience on the actual environments yourself especially if you remember to destroy afterwards (or use the complimentary period $250 credit).

I got my subscription for free through my employer. Initially, I was impressed with how it aggregated videos for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 certification but quickly come to the realisation of how bad the teaching and content are.

+ Hands-on lab creates a test AWS account for you dynamically

- Random unrelated videos, I've got a feeling these are legacy videos that they've just thrown in to beef up the course
- Content is outdated
- Ryan, the lecturer, is just reading from the slides copied from AWS Docs. It's very boring.
- The teaching is really lacking depth. It felt as if someone tells you just put in Answer A rather than what is Answer A and why aren't others appropriate.
- Course is broken down into very granular videos, some may like it but I am finding it very fragmented.
- Majority of the videos are 3 to 8 mins long.
- Every single video has an intro, overview, summary and thank you. After a while, you will notice this is wasting a lot of your time and you will be repeatedly hearing:

"Hello cloud guru, welcome to this lecture. in this lecture, we will cover [Overview]

*Actual useful content*: Athena is a SQL like a wrapper to query s3.

In this lecture we have covered [Summary] Let me know if you have any questions. if not see you in the next lecture thank you"

This problem is exacerbated in some of the videos being 3,4 mins long.

- the new UI is also considerably slower

Overall, I do not recommend this learning platform. They do well in aggregating courses but really failed to deliver a good learning experience.

I will recommend Udemy, Pluralsight, O'reilly, especially O'reilly where the speakers are more engaging with their own illustrations (Not copied from AWS) and they are usually the subject matter expert.

I got mail from pluralsight that i can get free plan to view lot of cloud videos. I registered in the free plan and try to view some course about Azure and all of them if you try to start they ask you to upgrade and pay.

Dont waste time on registering in free plan! dont make this kind of marketing and waste users time please!!

Great course content, well-designed learning experience, and great value for the price paid.

I subscribed for a year with ACG in order to prepare myself for the Azure Data Engineer certification (DP-200, DP-201, DP-203. The learning paths are incomplete and the test exam at the end does not prepare at all for the certification. I realized that when I bought test exams from other web sites like Udemy or SkillCertPro.

I shoud have started with Microsoft Learning path instead of waste my time to the Guru Plateform.

What is the most frusturating aspect of their website is the sale pitch "Learn by doing". In fact, most of the Azure services related to DP-203 was not available on the playground plateform sandbox.
I complained about it but I never had any feedback from them.
If you want to learn Azure with an data engineering perspective, do not waste your money with AGC.

I have given 2 stars because the learning path for Azure Fundamental certification is acceptable.