The honest budget option — taken seriously.
Stellar Education occupies a spot this industry needs: regulated qualifications, self-paced online, at prices published where anyone can read them — £724 for the Level 3, £1,987 for the Level 5, as their pages listed when we logged them. For a self-directed learner who wants a regulated certificate without live-class scheduling, that is honest value and we have said so on our qualification-providers page since day one.
The differences that remain are format and authorship. Self-paced means you study an awarding body’s licensed specification alone; CLF teaches live — two days on a physical London trading floor or live online — from a curriculum our own traders wrote and tested with cohorts for years before accreditation, with the Stargate platform and a human team around it. And the ladders differ at the first rung: their cheapest regulated entry is £724; ours is £120 with the exam and certificate inside it. If you are choosing between exactly these two, this is the whole choice.