I’m extremely new to Unreal Engine 4, and I’ve heard that Maya is the best option for animating. Can you guys tell me some cheaper options to Maya? By ‘‘cheaper’’ I mean ‘‘Preferrably free, as I have no money to spend’’ 
Blender. You can do everything in it.
You can get Maya LT, which is everything you need and is far cheaper. You can get it for $240 total for a year. Otherwise you can do the $30 a month.
Otherwise, Blender is free as stated above.
Also If you are a student, you can get Maya free for 3 years 
False!
Just kidding ( not really ), but if you would like to use Maya LT you cannot use the ART plugin because python is not supported, so I strongly suggest you to take a look at Blender ( free ) or Houdini Indie which you can buy for the ridiculous price of 199$
Maya and Maya LT has HumanIK which is quite good for animating characters as it gives you a control rig for both forward and inverse kinematics, but Blender is most definitely the way to go if money is limited. Blender also has a graph editor like Maya and the others which is pretty much necessary to clean up animations.
If you are new to animation Blender is probably the best place to get to grips with it at first anyway, most likely it will take a while to learn the shortcuts etc and animation techniques. This might take you a month or 2 to get used to so there would be 2 months of subscription to Maya LT basically wasted on just learning how to do animate and not necessarily creating your animations.