Shopify Academy alternative: how to learn Shopify development now

Shopify Academy shuts down on October 29, 2026. If you are looking for a Shopify Academy alternative, the short answer is this: keep Shopify's free docs as your reference, and pair them with a course where you build real things and something checks your work. The goal is the same as it always was: being able to ship.

Below: the dates, what the shutdown means for developers and for agencies, an honest comparison of the options, and how to train a team now that Shopify's own track is gone.

Shopify Academy is shutting down: the dates

Everything here comes from Shopify's Academy FAQ on the Help Center.

For the full detail on refunds paid with a company card and what happens to each kind of credential, see Shopify Academy is closing: what happens to your refunds and badges.

What it means for developers

When people get hired, what usually decides it is work they can show: a store they built, a section a merchant can actually edit, a pull request someone can read. So whatever you use to learn now, make sure it leaves you with things like that.

So the shutdown changes less than it seems. You lose a free, ordered starting point. You do not lose anything you need to get work. And since certifications no longer count toward Partner tiers, there is nothing to renew or chase. Your proof is the work itself: themes on a development store, code people can read, and an app installed on a real store.

What it means for agencies

For agencies, Academy did two jobs: a free onboarding track for new hires, and certifications that fed into Partner tiers. The second job is gone, and Shopify says tiers are unaffected, so there is nothing to fix there.

The first job is the one to replace. Shopify now points people to three places: the Dev Docs, the Partner Help Center and the Dev Community Forums. All three are good. None of them is a training plan. A new hire still needs an order to learn things in, practice that looks like your actual client work, and someone or something that tells them when their code is wrong before a client does.

Shopify Academy alternatives compared

No single option does everything, and the free ones belong in any plan. Here is what each is good for and where it stops.

Whatever else you pick, two free things are worth doing alongside it: read the source of Shopify's own Horizon theme to see how a production theme is put together, and practise on a free development store.

Why hands-on practice works

This part is about learnshopify.dev, which I built, so read it with that in mind. I built it around one idea: you learn Shopify development by doing the work and having it checked, not by watching and then answering a quiz.

• Theme development, five modules. You join a fictional coffee company as a junior developer and every lesson is a task from the team. You write real Liquid in an editor and a realistic storefront updates next to it, with nothing to install. Checks go past "does it render": they flag inline styles, raw prices without the money filter, and the other things a reviewer would send back.
• App development path. You build one real app, a bundle app, on your own development store, with the real Shopify CLI on your own machine and an AI coding agent writing the code. A command line tool checks your local code, and the platform checks your store through the Admin API. It ends with the app live on a second store of yours. The first 15 lessons are free.
• Reviewing AI code. Some lessons hand you code an AI wrote and ask whether it ships. That is a large part of the job now.

There are 211 lessons live today. Each module you finish gives you a certificate with a link anyone can verify. To be clear, that is our certificate, not a Shopify credential. Treat it as a record that you did the work, next to the stores and code you can show.

Start with Module 1 for free, no card needed. If you already know themes and want to build apps, go straight to the app development path.

How to train an agency team now

If you used Academy to onboard developers, this is the plan I would put in its place. It works with any mix of the options above.

1. Write down what "ready" means. List five or six tasks a new developer must ship alone before they touch client work. For example: a section with a schema the merchant can edit, a metafield on a product page, a change to the cart drawer, and a pull request you would merge without rewriting.
2. Make shopify.dev the shared reference. When a question comes up, the answer gets checked against the docs, not against memory or a chat reply. If a filter or tag is not in the docs, it does not exist in Shopify.
3. Give them a structured, hands-on path. Something with an order and checked tasks, so the first feedback on their code does not come from a senior developer's afternoon or from a client.
4. Have them build on a development store. Then review their pull request the way you review client work. That review is the real exam.
5. Teach them to review AI output. Your team is going to use AI tools anyway. The skill worth training is spotting what the generated code got wrong before it reaches a store.

Where to start today

• New to Shopify development: start Module 1 free and keep shopify.dev open next to it.
• Already building themes: the app development path takes you through a real app on your own store, first 15 lessons free.
• Halfway through an Academy course: find the course in this list to see where each topic is taught now.
• Learning on free resources only: follow the free 6-week plan, built from shopify.dev, the Horizon source and a dev store.
• Onboarding a new developer at an agency: use the two-week onboarding checklist.
• Coming from Academy: until November 30, 2026 there is 30% off your first Pro payment with code ACADEMY30.
• Hold an Academy credential: keep it on your profile until January 1, 2028, and start adding work you can link to.
• Running an agency: write your "ready" list this week, then send a team request. See the pricing page for individual plans.