Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Epic React (Kent C. Dodds) vs AlternativeTo vs Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action)

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Epic React (Kent C. Dodds) (epic-react)
- URL: https://www.epicreact.dev
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: paid — One-time purchase, roughly $600 for Epic React Pro · regional PPP pricing · 30-day refund
- What it is: Rebuilt for React 19: seven workshops and 243 interactive exercises covering fundamentals, hooks, advanced APIs, Suspense, patterns, performance and Server Components, all in TypeScript. Includes lifetime access with progress tracking, 16 expert interviews, Discord channels and completion certificates.
- Why builders pick it: The most rigorous React course going, and genuinely current on Server Components. But it is built for engineers who will write React for years; most vibe coders get more from the free Next.js Learn course.
- Trap: Price loads dynamically at checkout and moves with sales and regional pricing. The exercise-heavy format takes real weeks of work, so it is wasted money if you plan to skim it.
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/epic-react

## AlternativeTo (alternativeto)
- URL: https://alternativeto.net
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · no paid tier · funded by partnerships and optional donations
- What it is: Crowdsourced database of 150,000+ apps and services ranked by more than two million user opinions, filterable by platform, licence, self-hosted and open source. Community rankings sit alongside staff-curated Crew Picks, and anyone can submit apps or reviews.
- Why builders pick it: The honest counterweight to paid AI directories: when a tool doubles its price or kills its free tier, this is where you find the cheaper or self-hostable replacement in one search.
- Trap: Rankings reward long-standing vote counts, so established tools outrank newer ones and coverage of 2026-era agent tooling lags specialist directories.
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/alternativeto

## Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action) (anthropic-academy)
- URL: https://www.anthropic.com/learn
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · every course and certificate, no credit card · account required
- What it is: Anthropic's own course catalog, hosted on Skilljar. Tracks cover Claude 101, Claude Code 101, Cowork, Agent Skills, MCP and the Claude API. Claude Code in Action is the deepest: plan mode, compaction, the rewind menu, hooks, permission modes, headless runs, GitHub Actions review and packaging plugins.
- Why builders pick it: Free, current, and written by the people who ship the tool, so it is right about defaults that blog posts get wrong. Best first stop once you are past single prompts and want longer unsupervised runs.
- Trap: Vendor training: it teaches the Anthropic way and never compares Claude Code with Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI. Courses change as the product ships, so bookmarked lessons go stale.
- Wiring: https://anthropic.skilljar.com
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/anthropic-academy

## Quick read

- Free with no card: AlternativeTo, Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action).

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=epic-react,alternativeto,anthropic-academy