That's exactly how I feel about the hand drawn fx in Toon Boom. I think it definitely comes down to the instructor.

I've done half of Markus Magnussons Character Animation for MDS and just completed Advanced Motion Methods on SOM. If you have the money and the subject is right I'd definitely recommend doing SOM, it feels way more professional and I've got way more out of it. Saying that for the price the MDS course is good and MM is an amazing tutor, but the lessons feel way more specific and less of a game-changer (half way through) than Advanced Motion Methods. Also SOM as whole feels like more of a professional outfit than MDS.

They seem to be very different types of courses, and are priced accordingly. I haven't taken anything with SOM yet (although I definitely plan to), but I have had some experience with MDS.

TLDR; a mixed bag. I took their free course, and then a Black Friday discounted version of their Motion Beast course, and got something worthwhile from each. They weren't super in depth, but were well-structured and clear. I picked up some good tips, and had a few topics that had intimidated me demystified, but not much more than that. I also took their Cinema 4D journey, which, frankly, sucked. Laura P's comments are pretty spot-on.

I have to say though, I do absolutely love their free Motion Tools plugin. Very similar to Mt Mograph's Motion 2, but with a few little UI quirks and additional features that somehow make it perfect for most of my workflows.

Markus Magnusson's character animation class at MDS is really good. I think it really depends on the individual instructor.

Lol I tweeted about motion design school's cinema 4d journey course a few months ago which led to SoM offering me to take c4d Basecamp for free in exchange for a review of it.

Anyways I can only speak for for their cinema 4d course since it's the only MDS course I've taken but it was really poorly laid out. They expected complete beginners to immediately use redshift which no explanations for the built in renders (what about mac users who didn't have access to redshift or those using trial versions of cinema?). It was like "draw the rest of the fucking owl" with the course. Also one of the lessons was literally just a link to a publicly free lesson that anyone could have access to regardless if they paid for the course or not. It just felt very lazy and not comprehensive.

In comparison SOM Basecamp was VERY thorough and while I had my own qualms with it, it is very professionally run and you do learn cinema 4d from scratch. SOM has excellent quality control and instructors. MDS feels like youtubers running a knockoff version of SOM. You can definitely learn from MDS but just know that they're cheaper for a reason. /my two cents

I'd agree with Steve -- I have done 2 SoM courses and 1 MDS.

SoM feels like a classical school environment, where there is a lecture (and supplementing materials like podcasts, pdf's, site recommendations etc.) and you do assignments.

MDS feels more like a mature youtube channel, full of tutorials. Their method is very much like "select this effect, turn this setting to 37,8 and then rotate it by 19,9 degrees, to achieve the same results I did in this video"

Whichever style you prefer is the better one.

Both are good, it's a matter of personal preference. Some people like SoM, others like MDS. I think it really comes down to how you like to learn, if you need a lot of handholding, then School of Motion is probably the better choice. They have homework critiques, podcasts, facebook groups for their classes.

Motion Design School is a lot cheaper because you have to do a lot of the work yourself, there are no professionals critiquing your work, but obviously you can just substitute that by asking people you know to critique your work.

I have the MDS Motion Beast course and a couple of others. It is really great and they have continued to improve and add to it over the year I have had access to it. I can't not recommend it, but I do feel I am missing out on the SoM courses. Maybe it is SoM's experience in the industry or something to do with their pedagogy. They do have teachers who have been in the industry longer, and rather than showing how to do 'x' in AfterEffects, they explain the principal more than MDS does which I think gives the edge. SoM never do discounts as such and I think that helps communicate value in what you learn. But MDS have still been great and I regularly refer back to the courses.