Mike Holt side-by-side review (review 3)

What Mike Holt is and what it isn't

Mike Holt's training products are the gold standard for NEC education. His Understanding the NEC series, Illustrated Guide, exam prep books, and video courses have trained a huge chunk of the electricians working today. If you sat for your journeyman or master exam in the last twenty years, you probably saw his graphics.

That said, Mike Holt is a learning system, not a field tool. The books live on a shelf. The videos live on a laptop. The code app he offers is a digital version of the NEC with bookmarks and notes. Useful, but it still makes you hunt through articles the same way paper does.

Ask BONBON is a different animal. It answers code questions in plain English, cites the article, and gets you back to pulling wire. Both can live in your truck. They do different jobs.

Side by side on a real call

Kitchen remodel, homeowner wants under cabinet lighting and a new island receptacle. You need to confirm GFCI requirements, the island receptacle count, and whether the lighting needs to be on a separate circuit.

With Mike Holt's code app or the Illustrated Guide, you open to Article 210, scan 210.8(A) for GFCI locations, flip to 210.52(C) for island receptacles, then check 210.70 for lighting. Five to ten minutes if you know where to look. Longer if you don't.

With Ask BONBON, you type "island receptacle and GFCI for a kitchen remodel" and get the answer with NEC 210.8(A)(6), NEC 210.52(C)(2), and the 2023 change to island receptacle counts cited in one response. Thirty seconds.

• Mike Holt: deep context, diagrams, exam ready explanations
• Ask BONBON: fast answers with citations, built for the job site
• Both: accurate to current NEC cycles

Where Mike Holt wins

For learning the code, nothing touches it. The Illustrated Guide's graphics on grounding versus bonding, transformer calculations, and service entrance sizing are the clearest explanations published anywhere. If you are prepping for an exam or trying to actually understand why 250.30 works the way it does, spend the money.

The video content is also strong. Mike and his instructors walk through worked examples at a pace that sticks. You cannot replicate that from a chatbot. You need to sit and watch and take notes.

If you are within six months of your master's exam, buy the exam prep package. Do not rely on a code search tool to teach you load calculations. You will fail.

Where Ask BONBON wins

Speed on the job. When you are on a ladder at 2pm and the inspector just asked about tamper resistant receptacles in a dwelling hallway, you do not want to scroll a PDF. You want the answer and the article number. NEC 406.12 covers it, and Ask BONBON returns that in one tap.

Plain language also helps when you are translating code to a homeowner or a GC who does not read NEC. You can read the answer out loud and it makes sense. Mike Holt's material is written for electricians studying, not for field explanation.

• One handed use on a phone, no flipping pages
• Answers specific to your scenario, not a general article
• Updated for 2023 NEC, including the receptacle and GFCI changes
• Works offline on recent builds for basement and crawlspace work

Price and practical value

Mike Holt's Understanding the NEC Volume 1 and 2 runs around 200 dollars retail. The full exam prep library with videos pushes past 500. That is fair for what it is, a complete education product.

Ask BONBON costs a fraction of that per year and pays for itself the first time you save a callback over a wrong GFCI location or an undersized conductor per NEC 310.16. Different value proposition. You are not paying to learn the code, you are paying to apply it faster.

For a first year apprentice, Mike Holt is the better investment. For a journeyman or master running calls, Ask BONBON earns its keep every week.

What I actually keep in my truck

Both. The Illustrated Guide lives behind the seat for the rare moment I want to sit and read through an article with the diagrams. Ask BONBON lives on my phone for the other 99 percent of code questions that come up between punch list items.

They are not competitors in the way people assume. Mike Holt taught me the code. Ask BONBON helps me use it faster. If you are building a trade library from scratch, get one of each and stop arguing on forums about which is better.

Keep the book for study nights. Keep the app for the panel. Neither one replaces your own judgment or a call to the AHJ when something is genuinely gray.

The honest take: if I had to pick one tool to carry tomorrow, it would be the one on my phone. But I would not give up the books, and neither should you.