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 — Next.js Learn (Vercel) 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.

## Next.js Learn (Vercel) (next-js-learn)
- URL: https://nextjs.org/learn
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · free Vercel account only needed for the deploy chapters
- What it is: Vercel's official free courses. The 16-chapter Next.js Foundations track builds a real dashboard app: App Router layouts, CSS and fonts, Postgres setup, Server Components, static versus dynamic rendering, streaming, search and pagination, Server Actions, error handling, accessibility, NextAuth and metadata. Companion tracks cover React Foundations and the Pages Router.
- Why builders pick it: The best free way to learn what your agent is actually generating when it writes Next.js. Working chapters 6 to 11 by hand makes you far better at reviewing and fixing agent output.
- Trap: Written by the framework vendor, so it routes you to Vercel hosting and Vercel Postgres by default, and chapters trail the newest Next.js release by months.
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/next-js-learn

## 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

## 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=next-js-learn,alternativeto,anthropic-academy