(Disclaimer: I have only seen part of the material, for both courses) This seems true in terms of difficulty, mostly because CS229 assumes a much stronger math

(Disclaimer: I have only seen part of the material, for both courses) This seems true in terms of difficulty, mostly because CS229 assumes a much stronger math background and provides more of the theory for a lot of the ML techniques being used. However, if you want to know the "technique space" of usual ML algorithms and when/how to apply them, the Coursera course seems to be 70-90% of the way there in terms of breadth of the material (with a bias towards the most commonly used methods, so perhaps 70% of the techniques, applicable to more than 90% of the use cases). So, if you want to do ML in industry, applied to common problems, the Coursera course will get you there. If you want to become an ML researcher, the Coursera course will fall way short of that, while CS229 might be at least a first step (followed by CS229T/STATS231 [1]). [1] Lecture notes online, too: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs229t/ https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs229t/