Platzi Course Catalog Scraper

Scrapes the full Platzi course catalog (~1500+ courses across all categories). Returns structured data for every course including title, teacher, rating, duration, level, syllabus topics, and certification status. Covers Spanish and Portuguese tracks.

What it scrapes

Platzi is the dominant Spanish-language tech education platform with over 1900 courses across categories like software development, AI, data science, design, marketing, English, and more. This actor retrieves the complete public course catalog from the sitemap and enriches each entry with detail-page data.

Fields returned per course:

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Course slug (unique identifier)
title	string	Full course title
slug	string	URL slug
language	string	Language code (es or pt)
level	string	Difficulty level (básico, intermedio, avanzado)
duration_hours	number	Total course duration in hours
teacher_name	string	Primary instructor name
teacher_bio	string	Instructor short biography
rating	number	Average rating (0–5 scale)
rating_count	number	Number of student ratings
syllabus_topics	string	Pipe-separated list of syllabus section titles
description_text	string	Plain-text course description
thumbnail_url	string	Course thumbnail image URL
certification_offered	boolean	Always true (Platzi offers certificates for all catalog courses)
is_free	boolean	Always false (subscription-only catalog)
is_school_track	boolean	Whether part of an escuela (school track)
school_name	string	Escuela name, when applicable
student_count	number	Enrolled students (minimum 50 shown on public pages)
source_url	string	Canonical course URL

Fields not available without a paid Platzi account (skills, last_updated, subcategory) are returned as null.

Use cases

• Ed-tech competitive intelligence — track Platzi's full catalog composition, instructor roster, rating distribution, and content depth across categories
• US Hispanic-market affiliate sites — generate course listings with rich metadata for Spanish-speaking audiences
• Corporate L&D benchmarking — evaluate Platzi's coverage of specific technical skills vs. competitors
• Research — course-level analysis of Spanish-language tech education content, duration patterns, and rating spread

How to use

Basic run (default: 10 courses)

Run with default settings to scrape 10 courses and verify output. Set Max Items to 0 or leave empty to scrape the full catalog (~1552 courses).

Full catalog run

Set maxItems to a large number (e.g. 2000) or leave it empty. A full run over all ~1552 courses completes within 30–45 minutes.

Input parameters:

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum courses to scrape. Leave empty for the full catalog.

Output example

{
  "id": "fundamentos-arquitectura-software",
  "title": "Curso de Fundamentos de Arquitectura de Software",
  "slug": "fundamentos-arquitectura-software",
  "language": "es",
  "level": "básico",
  "duration_hours": 14,
  "teacher_name": "Nicolas Bohorquez",
  "teacher_bio": "Software Architect, Data Architect, Software Developer, Technical Writer, Book Author, Angel Investor, Startup founder.",
  "rating": 4.8,
  "rating_count": 345,
  "syllabus_topics": "Contexto | Frugalidad | Estructura del Software | Diseño del Software | Proyecto | Epilogo",
  "description_text": "Aprende los conceptos esenciales para diseñar sistemas de software estructurados...",
  "thumbnail_url": "https://static.platzi.com/media/courses/Piezas-fundamentos-arquitectura-software_OG-compressed.jpg",
  "certification_offered": true,
  "is_free": false,
  "is_school_track": false,
  "school_name": null,
  "student_count": 50,
  "source_url": "https://platzi.com/cursos/fundamentos-arquitectura-software/"
}

Notes

• Course data is sourced from Platzi's public sitemap (sitemap-cursos.xml) and server-rendered detail pages. No login required.
• student_count shows a minimum of 50 on public pages — actual enrollment is higher but only visible to logged-in users.
• category is returned as null because Platzi's detail pages do not expose a reliable course-specific category field without authentication.
• The actor uses Platzi's public sitemap as the discovery source. Courses not listed in the sitemap (draft/unlisted) are not included.