Choosing one
No ranked list. We make one of these.
Every best AI tutor article puts its own product at number one, so here is the thing that is actually useful instead: what separates the categories, the questions that discriminate between two products, and where this kind of tool is the wrong answer.
- 3 categoriesRoutinely confused
- 8 questionsThat separate them
- 0 rankingsWe are not neutral
Three categories, not one market
Almost every disappointing purchase in this space is a category error rather than a bad product. People buy one of these expecting another one, and then conclude that AI tutoring does not work.
General assistants
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest. Enormously capable, cheap or free, and not built to teach — they are built to be helpful, and being helpful means giving you the answer. Excellent for a quick explanation or a definition. The failure mode is that reading a fluent answer feels exactly like understanding it, and you find out it was not the same thing in an exam hall.
Revision platforms
Seneca, Save My Exams, Physics & Maths Tutor and similar. These are libraries: notes, worked solutions, quizzes, past papers, and increasingly some AI on top. They are genuinely good at the job they do, which is retrieval — keeping hold of content you understood once. They are not built for the topic you never understood in the first place, because a quiz can tell you that you got it wrong and cannot work out why.
Dedicated tutors
Tools built around teaching rather than answering, Lumi among them. The distinguishing behaviour is that they work out where you got lost before they explain, they change the explanation when it fails, and they check you can do it before you leave. Most people who want an AI tutor want this category and buy from one of the other two.
Worth adding a fourth thing that gets caught in the same searches: marketplaces that connect you to human tutors. Those are a different purchase entirely, priced accordingly, and they are the right answer for some of what follows.
Eight questions that actually separate them
Feature lists do not discriminate, because everything in this category lists the same features. These are behaviours, and you can test all eight in one free session.
- Does it ask you anything before it explains? A tutor finds the gap first. A tool that starts answering the moment you finish typing is an answer engine, whatever it is called.
- Can you interrupt it? Being able to stop an explanation halfway and say the third line lost me is the difference between a lesson and a lecture.
- What happens when the first explanation does not land? The useful behaviour is a different explanation. The useless one is the same explanation, slower.
- Does it work from your specification and exam board, or from a generic version of the subject? Boards differ on what you are given and what you must recall.
- Can you put your own material in — your notes, a past paper, a photo of the question, your own attempt at it?
- Does it make you produce something before the session ends? If nothing is checked, nobody finds out whether it worked until an exam does it for you.
- Does it draw, and does the drawing appear as it talks? In maths, physics, chemistry and economics the diagram is not decoration.
- What does it cost per hour of use, not per month? A cheap subscription used twice is expensive.
Red flags
- A guaranteed grade. Nobody can guarantee this and offering it tells you what kind of company you are dealing with.
- A mark, presented as though it were your board's mark. It is not calibrated to your board and believing a generous one is expensive.
- Unlimited, with no number anywhere. Ask what the number is.
- Positioning against teachers rather than alongside them.
- No free tier. If you cannot test it on the subject you are actually stuck in, you are buying a habit you have not tried.
- Reviews with no year group, no subject and no specific thing that changed.
Where none of this is the right tool
If the problem is that nobody is making sure the work happens, no software solves that and a human tutor at £30 to £60 an hour might. If the problem is that you have never sat a paper to time, the fix is past papers and a clock. If you need work marked to your board’s standard, that is your teacher, who has seen the standardisation and is free. An AI tutor is for the specific case where an explanation has not landed and you want another one, now, from something that will keep going until it does.
Our conflict of interest, stated plainly
We build one of these, so weigh this page accordingly. What we have tried to do is write the version that is still useful if you read it and then buy something else, because a page that only works when it wins is not advice. The checklist above is the one we would want a competitor held to.
Common questions
There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one is selling something — this one included, since we make one. The honest version is that the category splits into general assistants, revision platforms with AI added, and tools built specifically to teach, and they fail in different ways. Work out which of the three you actually want first; the choice within a category matters far less than the choice between them.
For a quick explanation, a general assistant is genuinely good and costs nothing, and pretending otherwise would be silly. The difference shows up in behaviour rather than knowledge: a general assistant is built to be maximally helpful, which means answering, and answering is the thing that feels like learning and is not. A tutor is built to make you do the work.
For the explaining, largely. For accountability, no — and that is not a small part of what you are buying at £30 to £60 an hour. Somebody arriving on Tuesday who will know whether you did the work moves more students than any feature does. The realistic comparison for most families is not AI tutor against human tutor; it is AI tutor against nothing.
Guaranteed grades. Anything that gives you a mark and implies it is your board's mark. Unlimited claims with no numbers behind them. Marketing that positions it as a replacement for your teacher. And anything with no free tier — if you cannot try it before paying, you are being asked to buy a habit you have not tested.
Two weeks of genuine use, on the subject you are actually stuck in rather than the one you enjoy. That is long enough for novelty to wear off, which is when you find out whether you open it on the evening you do not feel like studying. Reviews cannot tell you that and neither can a feature list.
If you want a library of notes, quizzes and worked solutions to work through, a revision platform does that and we do not. If what you need is somebody holding you to a schedule, a human tutor is the answer. If you want work marked to your board's standard, that is your teacher. We are a tutor for the part where an explanation has not landed, and that is a narrower job than most of this category claims.
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