10 Best System Design Courses for Beginners and Experienced Developers in 2025
Hello folks, if you are preparing for technical interviews for a Software Engineering job, you may know the importance of Software Design or System design topic.
It is one of the most important but, at the same time, very tough topics to master, and many programmers, even experienced developers, struggle to solve System design problems during interviews, particularly while interviewing with top tech companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, etc, popularly known as FAANG.
If you are also preparing for a programming job interview and looking for the best System design and Software design resources, you are at the right place.
I have shared the best System Design Books, System Design Questions, System Design Cheat Sheets, and Best Places to learn System Design. In this article, I will share the best System Design Interview courses from Udemy, one of my favorite places to learn programming and technical stuff.
A couple of years ago, you could hardly find any decent System design courses online like on Udemy; the available ones barely touched the topic of Scalability, resiliency, and flexibility, but things have changed since.
Nowadays, there are so many System design courses you can find on Udemy, but again, not everything is excellent, and you need to be careful while choosing the right path for you.
Many of my readers asked me which System design course to join on Udemy to prepare for programming interviews, so I decided to share my recommendations.
The list includes System design interview courses from those who have been part of that interview and have experience from both sides of the table as a candidate and interviewer. For example, Frank Kane, an ex-Amazon hiring manager, whose System Design interview course is one of the best on Udemy.
You can join one or more of these System design courses to prepare for your System design interview. One of the best things about Udemy is that it’s very affordable, and now is probably the best time as they are running the biggest sale of the season where all the top courses are available for almost 85% discount; you can join a couple of excellent methods with a price of one.
Anyway, let’s jump into the best System design courses from Udemy, ByteByteGo, DesignGuru, ZTM Academy, Educative, and other popular online platforms and find the one right for you.
Without wasting any more time, here is a list of the best online courses you can join on Udemy to learn about essential System design concepts and prepare for System design interviews in 2025.
1. ByteByteGo System Design Course by Alex Xu
Not many people know about this resource, but it’s one of the best resources I have come across to learn and improve System Design and Software Design. This site is created by Alex Xu , author of the famous System Design Interview — An Insider’s Guide, one of the best-selling System Design book on Amazon, and it not only cover the book’s content but more than that.
The best thing about this site is that it provides a step-by-step solution to common System Design Problems and illustratively explains many vital concepts.
You will also learn about Scalability, like How to scale your web app From Zero To Millions Of Users, Messaging, Caching, and other key system design concepts. If you are serious about System design, I highly recommend you check out this site.
Here is the link to learn more — ByteByteGo
You can see how easy it is to understand concepts using this illustrative diagram, and ByteByteGo is full of such graphs. It also has free content, like how to design YouTube and WhatsApp, and a friendly Framework For System Design Interviews.
2. Mastering the System Design Interview by Frank Kane
In this course, you will learn everything about designing a system that scales, often known as Google’s scale, to handle millions and billions of users and transactions and Algorithms and Data Structures like Bloom Filter, which plays a critical role in large-scale systems.
The course will also teach you System design strategies which can be crucial even if you don’t know the answer.
Apart from System design essentials, This five-hour-long course will also give you insider tips for your system design interview from Frank Kane , a former Amazon hiring manager, and six mock interviews for practice!
If cost is your concern and you are looking for an affordable course to prepare for your System Design interview, this is the best Software design course for you.
Here is the link to join this course — Mastering the System Design Interview
3. Grokking Modern System Design For Software Engineers
This is one of the newest System design courses on Educative and reflects all the hard work and experience they gained by creating a couple of the best System design courses you will find online.
As System design best practices have evolved, the expertise required to design and build these systems has evolved; that’s where this course will help you. It shares the most modern and up-to-date System design best practices you will find online.
This course starts with teaching you first the fundamental building blocks. From there, you will learn how to combine those building blocks to design and deploy scalable services through real-world examples.
System design will remain a cornerstone of modern software engineering no matter where your career takes you. Team and product managers will architect scalable solutions, leveraging big data stores, user interaction, and distributed microservices.
Meanwhile, developers will implement those designs by linking the building blocks together. System design isn’t going anywhere, so everyone in software engineering needs to develop a working knowledge of system design.
Here is the link to join this course — Grokking Modern System Design For Software Engineers
The course will be an excellent brief introduction to the fantastic world of modern system design. It is perfect for beginners as you will learn about system design from scratch. You will know precisely what system design is and why it is used.
You can join this course individually or take an Educative Unlimited subscription (recommended) to access their 300+ high-quality, text-based, interactive systems to learn critical skills for coding interviews, software development, and technology.
5. Grokking the System Design Interview on DesignGuru
This is one of my favorite System design courses, available on Educative, but now it's moved exclusively to Designguru.io. This site is created by Arslan Ahmad
, a former software engineer @ Facebook, Microsoft, Hulu, and a writer, probably one of the best people to learn System design concepts.
This course gives you a solution to popular System design questions like how to design a chat system like WhatsApp? or a URL shortener and a complete System Design template on how to approach and solve a system design problem.
Apart from that, it’s an interactive online course where you can practice online right on your browser, and it also has community support. Still, the best thing I liked about this course was the case studies on various system design problems. That’s the real gem of this course.
In short, it’s one of the best courses to learn system design, and if you want to crack your system design interview with confidence, you should check out this course. Here is also an excellent system design, a template, or a cheat sheet you can check out from them.
Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the System Design Interview
They also offer a bundle of all of their system design and coding interview courses, which you can get for a significant discount. Use code GURU for a 30% discount on any DesignGuru membership or class.
6. System Design Interview Course by Exponent
I didn’t know about this website for a long time, but when I found out, OMG, how can I miss this one!! It is truly one of the best websites to visit if you are preparing for FAANG interviews.
They have helped many people succeed in Amazon and Microsoft PM, TPM, and Software Development Engineer roles and have specialized courses for Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
You will learn to answer challenging system design questions like Design Twitter, Instagram, Parking Lot, Design a Web Crawler, and many other popular Software design questions. Overall a perfect System design course for engineers, managers, and architects.
But apart from the course, they also provide mock interviews, which is like an actual drill as well as 1-to-1 coaching and interactive discussion on popular interview questions from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, and you can join them for just $12 a month now (70% discount).
I highly recommend this course and website if you are preparing for System design interviews with FAANG companies.
Here is the link to join — The System Design Interview Course by Exponent
6. Rocking System Design by Rajdeep Saha [Udemy Course]
This is another system design course you can join on Udemy to learn about System design and Software design in general. Cloud Architect Rajdeep Saha created this course.
In this course, you will learn how to solve any system design problem by mastering the basics like scaling, sharding, hashing, microservices, load balancers, security, well-architected framework, and more.
You will also learn how to answer system design interview questions, which is essential if you are serious about cracking the System Design Interviews with FAANG companies.
The best thing about this course is that it will also teach you AWS implementation of the design using Kubernetes, Lambda, API Gateway, EC2, ALB, NLB, etc.
The course also covers essential topics about software architecture, like the pros/cons of different design decisions, evil vs. good answers, pitfalls to avoid, and more. It also contains many quizzes to test your knowledge with up-to-date system design quizzes.
Overall an excellent course to learn about System Design and Software architecture in 2025
Here is the link to join this course — Rocking System Design
7. System Design Interview Guide for Software Architecture
This is another fantastic System design course that Facebook engineer Sandeep Kaul created. This 8-hour course covers many essential System design topics and solutions to common System design problems like how to design Facebook and how to create Instagram, etc.
Here are the common System design questions that are explained in this Udemy course:
1. URL shortener design
2. AirBnb Booking System design
3. Amazon System Design
4. How to design WhatsApp
5. Uber System Design
6. Twitter System Design
7. How to design YouTube
8. How to design Zoom
9. How to design Google Map
The best thing about this course is the different case studies it shares, which can be used to learn how to design a modern system that can scale and run 24x7 all the time. I highly recommend this course to anyone preparing for a System Design Interview.
Here is the link to join this course — System Design Interview Guide
8. Pragmatic System Design by Alexey Soshin
Suppose you are looking for a to-the-point course covering key System design topics like Concurrency, Scalability, SQL vs. NoSQL, Microservices, etc. In that case, This Udemy course by 📙 Alexey Soshin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 is the perfect one for you.
It also teaches you how to solve the most popular FANG interview questions like Yelp Design, NetFlix Design, and Amazon System design questions.
Here are key topics you will learn in this course:
Even if you are not preparing for Technical interviews, you can join this course to improve your knowledge about System design and Software architecture. I recommend this course to senior engineers who want to learn about system design.
Here is the link to join this course — Pragmatic System Design
9. Software Architecture & Technology of Large-Scale Systems
This is another Software architecture course on Udemy that is worth checking out. It’s one of the most comprehensive System design courses by Anurag Yadav with more than 25.5 hours of content, while other courses only provide 5 to 8 hours.
It also covers critical system design topics like creating Software Systems with High Performance, Scalability, Availability, and Security using Modern Technologies.
The course starts with a basic three-tier application architecture, then moves along with advanced and modern software architecture like Microservices and distributed systems. You will also learn how to cater to Non-Functional Requirements like How to design architecture considering Performance, Scalability, Reliability, and Security.
Here is the link to join this course — Software Architecture & Technology of Large-Scale Systems
You will also get exposure to highly scalable technology and tech stacks like Nodejs, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc. More importantly, you will learn how to use Docker and Kubernetes for large-scale production deployment, an essential skill in this era of cloud computing.
10. ZTM Academy’s System Design Interview Course
This is one of the most recent and up-to-date courses on System Design, created by Zero To Mastery Academy and Yihua Zhang , one of their lead instructor and System design experts.
What I liked about this course is their chapter on Scalability, which explained the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling of Systems and the challenges distributed systems face.
What sets this course apart from other system design courses is its emphasis on seeing and executing the bigger picture.
It goes beyond low-level coding and encourages students to understand the broader system they are a part of, fostering a deeper comprehension of the “why” behind their work.
By providing a problem-solving framework and practical knowledge gained from Yihua’s industry experience, the course empowers students to become better problem-solvers and programmers.
Here is the link to join this course — Master the Coding Interview: System Design + Architecture.
, You would need a ZTM membership to watch this course, which costs around $39 per month and provides access to many super engaging and practical courses like this Python course. You can also use my code FRIENDS10 to get a 10% discount on any subscription.
That’s all about the best Software Design and System Design Interview course for beginners and experienced programmers and developers in 2025. To be honest, these are the top resources and it's hard to leave anyone out but considering the time I recommend you to join only one or two of these courses as the price is not a problem.
You can join all their bits if you like learning from multiple resources. Make sure you use them j, judicially, as you will not have enough time to go through every course. I generally make one course as a cornerstone and refer others to solidify different topics.
If I connect to one instructor better, I stick with that course more because when you connect to the instructor you tend to learn faster and faster. Then, watch previews of these courses to see if you are connecting with the instructor before joining these courses to save you time and money.
If you cannot withstand previews, you won’t enjoy the course either. So watch the preview System design lesson to see if the course deserves your time and money.
Other System Design Interview Resources you may like
Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these best System design and Software Design Interview Courses from Udemy and Educative, please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.
P. S. — If you are looking for a free online course to learn System Design and Software design, I suggest you check out this Tackling System Design Interview Problems free course on Codemia.io. This 2-hour free course is an excellent resource to prepare for System design interviews in 2025.
FrontEnd Technical Lead
5moSoma Sharma I have design guru course, is it same as course on deductive or it is different?
Sr Software Engineer at Kopius, Inc.
7moGreat article and thanks! helps me a lot to make a decision
Senior Java Developer at Freelancer
1yAnd, if you need System design questions for practice, here are 6 System Design Interview Questions with solution 1. YouTube Design - https://bit.ly/3bbNnAN 2. URL Shortner - https://bit.ly/3dZoQ2G 3. WhatsApp design - https://bit.ly/3SbA9Eu 4. Parking Lot Design - https://bit.ly/3eMUosX 5. Design a LMS - https://bit.ly/3SfwJQe 6. Instagram Design - https://bit.ly/3BqamCL 7. TinyURL Design - https://bit.ly/3S98WSc 8. more - https://bit.ly/3QtyuZl
Principal Technical Program Manager ✦ Program and Product Management ✦ AI/ML Advisor ✦ Cloud-Native Architect ✦ DevOps ✦ Certified ScrumMaster and Product Owner ✦ SAFe Coach ✦ PMP ✦ ITIL ✦ eCommerce
1yHi Soma Sharma , excellent analysis. Is there any Certification in the Market well recognized for system design? I Don't consider TOGAF in that category. Just a background about me. I am a program Manager and looking to prepare myself for interviews in the same profession. For me system design knowledge and possibly a good certification could be really beneficial.
Backend Developer | Aspiring Machine Learning Engineer | Co-founder at AlignDots | Software Engineer at Digital Growth Ventures
1yIt was full of info's