Free Generative AI Courses With Hands-On Labs, Compared

By Pooja Goenka · Published 2026-10-29

If you want a free generative AI course where you write and run real code, look at Microsoft's Generative AI for Beginners on GitHub, the Hugging Face LLM Course, Kaggle's 5-Day Gen AI Intensive with Google, and our own LogicWiz GenAI course. If you only want the ideas without coding, Google's Introduction to Generative AI and DeepLearning.AI's Generative AI for Everyone are better places to start.

A disclosure first: LogicWiz GenAI is our course. We tried to judge it the way we judged the others. We checked every fact below on each course's own page on 29 October 2026, and where a page was unclear, we say so.

What we mean by hands-on

We asked three questions of every course. Do you write and run code yourself, or watch someone else? Where does the code run: your laptop, a hosted notebook, or the lesson page? And what do you need before the first cell runs?

The last one catches people out. Most GenAI code calls a model hosted by someone else, which usually means an API key, and a free course can still send you to a provider who bills for those calls. We note this for every course where it applies, ours included.

The comparison at a glance

Google: Introduction to Generative AI

This one suits someone who wants to know what generative AI is and how it differs from older machine learning, with no code involved. The course on Google Skills calls itself "introductory level microlearning". Its activity list is videos, quizzes, one reading and a completion badge, with no labs. The page's structured data lists it as Free, and it sits in Google's beginner path of the same name (course page, checked 29 Oct 2026).

The limit is simple: you will understand the landscape but not build anything. Google's more technical paths are a separate step, and we did not check their lab pricing for this post.

DeepLearning.AI: Generative AI for Everyone

Andrew Ng's course says it needs no coding skills or prior AI knowledge. The course page lists video lessons, a couple of code examples and graded assignments, and its FAQ describes one exercise: prompting a model to classify and summarise restaurant reviews.

DeepLearning.AI's help centre says free members can watch course videos, use the forum and get newsletters, while quizzes, interactive labs and certificates come with the paid Pro plan (course page and membership FAQ, checked 29 Oct 2026). So on the free plan you get the explanations without the practice or the certificate.

Microsoft: Generative AI for Beginners

This is a developer course. The README says some Python or TypeScript helps and links to starter courses for newcomers. "Learn" lessons explain a concept; "Build" lessons add Python and TypeScript samples. Each lesson stands alone, so you can start anywhere. The whole course is a public GitHub repository under the MIT licence (repo, checked 29 Oct 2026).

The code runs in your own environment, and a setup lesson walks you through it. You pick a model provider: Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Foundry Models, the OpenAI API, or Foundry Local, which the README says runs models offline with no cloud subscription. The README also says GitHub Models is retiring at the end of July 2026, so older guides that point there are out of date. Setup is your job, and the cloud options bill you directly. Foundry Local avoids that if your machine can run it.

Hugging Face LLM Course

Pick this if your Python is solid and you want to see how transformers, tokenizers and fine-tuning work. The course asks for "a good knowledge of Python" and suggests taking an intro deep learning course first. Each section has a banner that opens the code in Google Colab or Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, and the notebooks are on GitHub too. It describes itself as completely free and without ads (chapter 1, checked 29 Oct 2026).

It is not a first course, and it has no certificate yet. The page says the team is working on a certification programme for the Hugging Face ecosystem.

Kaggle: 5-Day Gen AI Intensive Course with Google

It first ran live in 2025 and is now a self-paced guide. Each day pairs a whitepaper and a summary podcast with codelabs in Kaggle Notebooks: prompting with the Gemini API, building a RAG question-answering system over your own documents, text similarity with embeddings and more. You need a phone-verified Kaggle account and an AI Studio account that can generate an API key (guide, checked 29 Oct 2026).

The guide mentions no fee and no certificate, so check both yourself before relying on either. The codelabs were written around a specific Gemini version, so expect some drift. The same page now links to a newer Kaggle course on AI agents.

LogicWiz GenAI (ours)

Our course is for beginners who want one path from Python basics to AI agents, including newer topics like MCP and agent-to-agent (A2A) communication. Lessons pair a written explanation with interactive visualisations of the hard idea, such as how retrieval picks chunks in RAG, and a lab where you edit and run Python in the browser. There is nothing to install (course page, checked 29 Oct 2026).

The course is completely free and asks for no card. The early chapters open without an account, and later chapters need a free one. Most labs that call a language model ask for your own OpenAI key or a free NVIDIA key; if you choose OpenAI, OpenAI bills you for those calls. Labs with several AI agents run without a key. We would rather you know that before you start a lesson.

There is also a free certification exam, the LogicWiz GenAI Practitioner Certification, on LogicWiz Exams. Pass it and you get a certificate anyone can verify online (exam page, checked 29 Oct 2026). We wrote about why the labs live inside the lesson page in what hands-on actually means in a free GenAI course.

How to choose

If you do not code and do not plan to, start with Google's course and then watch the DeepLearning.AI videos. If you code and want official cloud samples, use Microsoft's repo, with Foundry Local if you want to avoid a cloud bill. If you know Python well and want the model internals, go to Hugging Face. If you like reading papers next to notebooks, try Kaggle's intensive. If you are early in Python and want to reach agents without setting anything up, try our LogicWiz GenAI course.

You can mix them. One concept course for the big picture plus one coding course for practice works well. To test the waters, our RAG tutorial for beginners builds a full pipeline in one Python file.

FAQ

Which free generative AI course has the most hands-on coding?

Microsoft's Generative AI for Beginners, the Hugging Face LLM Course, Kaggle's 5-Day Gen AI Intensive and LogicWiz GenAI all have you write and run code. Google's Introduction to Generative AI and the free tier of DeepLearning.AI's Generative AI for Everyone are mostly videos.

Do I need an API key for free GenAI courses?

Often, yes. Microsoft's samples need a model provider unless you use Foundry Local. Kaggle's codelabs ask for an AI Studio API key. Most LogicWiz labs that call a model ask for your own OpenAI key or a free NVIDIA key, and the multi-agent labs run without one.

Which free GenAI course gives a certificate?

Google's course ends with a badge. LogicWiz offers a free certification exam with a certificate anyone can verify. DeepLearning.AI gives certificates on its paid Pro plan. Hugging Face says it is working on a certification programme but the LLM Course has none yet.

Is there a free GenAI course for complete beginners with projects?

Yes. If you have never coded, LogicWiz GenAI starts with Python basics in the browser and builds up to agents. If you already know some Python, Microsoft's Build lessons are a good next step.