IXL vs Khan Academy

A parent comparing these two has usually already decided that something structured is needed, and is now looking at a free option and a paid one and wondering what the money buys. That is the right question, and "one is free" is not the answer to it.

We publish a pillar on each of these companies separately. This page exists for the narrower question: if it is one or the other, which, and why. Everything below is what the two companies say on their own sites, read in a browser on the date at the top.

The money, plainly

Khan Academy's courses are free. The paid thing is its AI tutor: Khan prices Khanmigo for families at $4/month, or $44/year. You can use the entire math library without ever touching it.

IXL is a subscription with three family tiers. Its pricing page says memberships start at only $9.95/month, which is the single-subject tier. Math plus language arts together is $15.95/mo, and the core-subjects tier adding science and social studies is $19.95/mo. Call it $120 to $240 a year depending on how much you want.

IXL also says its family memberships are perfect for homeschooling, which matters because homeschooling families are exactly the ones most likely to be weighing this against something free.

What the money actually buys: a decision

The row above is the whole comparison, and it is worth slowing down on.

IXL sells a placement. It says the IXL Diagnostic pinpoints your child's knowledge levels in math and English language arts in just 45 minutes per subject, and that IXL automatically creates a personalized learning plan of the exact skills your child is ready to learn next. Your child sits down, works for 45 minutes, and the product tells you what to do on Monday.

Khan sells nothing, and the consequence is structural rather than financial. Its closest feature to a placement is a course challenge, which Khan says is 30 questions long and covers all the skills across the entire course. A course you opened. If you open fourth grade math and your child struggles, you have learned they struggle with fourth grade math, not which grade they are working at, because you supplied that. Khan's own homeschool guidance makes the arrangement explicit: it tells you to decide what Khan Academy content you'd like your child to work on.

So the $120 a year is not buying better questions. It is buying somebody else making the decision about where to start. For a parent who already knows which topics are shaky, that decision is cheap to make yourself and Khan is extraordinary value. For a parent whose actual problem is not knowing where their child stands, it is the main thing they came for.

One of them shows its working

Here is a difference nobody mentions, and it is the one that would decide it for us.

Khan publishes what its scores mean, in a public help centre, to the percentage. It says below are the Mastery levels that each student can achieve within Khan Academy, then defines them: Attempted is students got fewer than 70% of the questions correct on an exercise, and Familiar is students completed an exercise with 70%-99% of the questions correct. You can read that before you ever sign up, and you can tell your child what the bar is.

IXL's equivalent number is SmartScore, which sits next to every skill a child practises. Across the four IXL pages we read, the family pricing page, the Diagnostic page, the math page and the analytics page, the word SmartScore does not appear once. We are not telling you IXL never explains it; we did not read every page on their site, and a signed-in parent may well see an explanation we cannot. We are telling you that on the four public pages a parent is most likely to read before paying, the number they will be looking at every day is not defined.

That is not a scandal and it does not make IXL's scoring wrong. It is a real difference in how much each company lets you check its work before you buy, and if you are the kind of parent who wants to know what a number means, Khan is being more open with you.

The full mastery ladder, since Khan publishes it

We quoted two rungs above. Here is the rest, because the whole thing is public and it is genuinely useful to a parent deciding what to ask of a child.

Khan defines Proficient as students completed an exercise with 100% of the questions correct. Above that sits Mastered, which a student reaches by being already at Proficient and then correctly answering questions on that skill in a mixed-skill assessment. At the bottom, Not Started means students haven't worked on this skill yet.

Two things follow for a parent. Proficient means perfect on one exercise rather than perfect forever, which is why Mastered requires getting it right again later in a mixed set. And a child can move backwards: Khan says a student at Mastered who misses questions on that skill drops to Familiar. That is a sensible design and it is also worth warning a child about, because a bar going backwards feels like a punishment if nobody explained it first.

The point is not that Khan's ladder is better than a SmartScore. It is that you can read this before you decide anything, and judge for yourself whether that is the bar you want for your child.

What the $4 tutor is, if you want it

Khanmigo is the only thing Khan charges families for, so it is worth being clear what it is before buying or dismissing it.

Khan calls it an AI-powered tutor, pitched as your new parenting hack, and says Khanmigo supports your child's learning with 24/7 help and integrates with Khan Academy's world-class content. So it is help while your child works. It is not a different curriculum and it is not a placement test. At $4/month or $44/year it is the cheapest thing on this page by a wide margin.

If the reason you were considering IXL was "my child gets stuck and I cannot always sit with them", that is the problem Khanmigo is aimed at, at a tenth of IXL's core-subjects price. If the reason was "I do not know what they should be working on", it is not, and no amount of 24/7 help answers that question.

What Khan says it is not

Khan is unusually direct about its own limits, in writing, on the page a homeschooling parent is most likely to open.

Its homeschool guidance says that while Khan Academy and Khan Kids provide valuable educational resources, neither are accredited schools, and that work completed on the sites does not count towards a formal diploma or degree. It then says what it does claim: that it offers a wealth of learning materials that can complement your child's education, stay on par with their peers, and help them prepare for standardized tests.

That is a company telling you where its product stops, unprompted, and it should raise rather than lower your trust in the rest of what it says. If you are homeschooling somewhere with a reporting requirement, neither product on this page satisfies it and you will need a norm-referenced test on top. We wrote up the at-home alternatives to the school diagnostics if that is the box you actually need ticked.

About those big numbers

IXL's pricing page leads with scale: over 18 million students use IXL, and 200 billion questions answered. Both are real and neither tells you what you need to know.

A large user base is evidence that a lot of schools bought something. It is not evidence that the scoring is well calibrated, that the plan it builds for your child is the right one, or that your particular eight year old will stick with it. Questions answered measures volume delivered, not learning produced, and a parent should hold both companies to the same standard there: Khan could print an equally large number and it would tell you equally little.

We hold ourselves to it too, which is why this site puts no user count in a headline. The number that matters is whether the thing is right about your child, and no company on this page, us included, has shown you that.

Read who each page is talking to

A small thing that tells you a lot about where a product came from.

IXL sells family memberships and says they are perfect for homeschooling. But its reporting page, the one that explains how you see what a child knows, opens with: discover IXL Analytics, the key to making the most of class time. It goes on to say IXL's reports show you precisely what your class knows and is ready to learn next. Your class. The product grew up in classrooms and the family membership is a door into the same machinery.

Khan is the mirror image in one respect. Its mastery documentation sits in a help centre section for teachers and coaches, and its homeschool guidance is written to a parent. Both companies serve schools and families. Neither is hiding it. But if you are a parent, it is worth knowing which reports were designed with you in mind, because that is what you will be reading on a Tuesday night.

What a Tuesday evening looks like

Both of these will be used in twenty-minute sittings after school, by a child who would rather be doing something else, so the motivation design matters more than the feature list.

IXL leans on rewards. It says it helps students master essential skills at their own pace through fun and interactive questions, built in support, and motivating awards, and its math page opens with gain fluency and confidence in math. The awards are a real part of the product rather than decoration, and for a child who responds to collecting things, that works.

Khan leans on the ladder. The reward is watching a skill move from Not Started to Familiar to Proficient, which is a quieter motivation and a more honest one, because the levels mean something you can look up. For some children that is enough. For others it is not, and no amount of pedagogical purity will make a seven year old care about a progress bar.

You know which child you have. This is the part of the decision that no comparison page can make for you, and it is worth more weight than the price difference, because the subscription that gets abandoned in week three is more expensive than either of these at full price.

One practical note. Both products are built to be used little and often rather than in long sessions, and both will happily absorb an hour if you let them. Twenty minutes with a visible stopping point beats an hour that ends in tears, whichever one you buy.

Which one to pick

Pick Khan if you know what to work on. The teaching is free, the library is enormous, and the scoring is documented. If your child needs practice on fractions and you know it, paying $120 a year to be told to practise fractions is not a good trade.

Pick IXL if the problem is not knowing where to start. The Diagnostic is the real product here, and Khan has no parent-startable equivalent. Forty-five minutes to a placement and a plan is worth money when the alternative is guessing, and guessing wrong costs your child weeks.

Or do both, in that order. Buy a month of IXL, run the Diagnostic, write down what it says, then do the work on Khan for free. Nothing we read in either company's pages prevents this, and for a family watching the budget it is the obvious move. Write the plan down before you cancel, because the plan is the part you are paying for.

If your child is showing signs of struggling, start with the measurement rather than the subscription. Knowing the gap is what makes either of these products useful.

Where Test My Kid fits, and where it does not

We publish this page, so here is the disclosure in plain words. Test My Kid is not a third option on this list. Both of these companies teach and we do not: there is no curriculum, no lessons and no videos here. If your child needs to be taught, one of the two above is what you should buy.

What we sell is the measurement, and the reason it belongs on this page is the decision the whole comparison turns on. Every result we produce names a grade and says whether your child is approaching, meeting or exceeding it, so you get a position rather than a percentage, and you see every question with your child's answer. Our levels are calibrated to NWEA MAP and iReady benchmarks, and nobody outside the company has audited that calibration, which is why it sits in the register below this article rather than in a headline.

The practical version: the first math check is free, with no account and no card. If you are about to pay IXL mostly to find out where your child stands, it costs you nothing to find that out first and then decide whether you are buying a placement or just buying teaching. If it turns out you only needed the teaching, Khan is free and we would rather you knew that.

You can read our fuller take on each company in our IXL comparison and our Khan Academy comparison.

How we checked this, and what we left out

Nine pages, read in a real browser on 12 October 2026: four on ixl.com and five across khanacademy.org, khanmigo.ai and Khan's help centre. Every quotation here is checked against that capture mechanically before the page can publish.

The split is four against five because that is roughly what the two publish to the open web on these questions, and it is part of the finding. Khan documents its mastery thresholds publicly; the equivalent IXL number is not defined on the family-facing pages we read. Where this page says something is not stated, that is a statement about those nine pages and not a claim about the product.

We did not sign up for either service, so we have not seen either company's reports for a real child. That is the obvious gap: both products are judged here on what they say they do. We also did not price IXL's school or teacher plans, which are a different purchase with different numbers.

One more gap worth naming: we compared the two on what they publish, and a product is also its day-to-day feel, which no capture reaches. If you can, run a child through twenty minutes of each before committing to a year of either.

Prices change. Every figure above is quoted with the page it came from and the date we read it. If what a company tells you differs from what is quoted here, trust the company and tell us.