Is there a Duolingo for maths? Yes. Here's the honest tour
It's one of the most-asked questions in every learning community, and it deserves better than a listicle that ranks the author's own product first. Disclosure up front: we build one of the apps below. The tour is honest anyway.
Updated July 2026
What people actually mean by the question
Nobody asking for “Duolingo for maths” wants an owl. They want the three things Duolingo nailed: open the app and it knows what you should do next, sessions short enough to always fit, and progress you can feel. That bundle, next-step clarity, small sessions, visible progress, is a perfectly reasonable demand to make of a maths app. Several products deliver parts of it. None delivers it the way Duolingo does for French, and there is a structural reason worth understanding before you choose.
The honest tour
Duolingo Math, from Duolingo itself, is free and genuinely fun for mental arithmetic, and that is roughly where it ends: narrow coverage, no meaningful diagnostic, not a route to algebra or calculus. Brilliant has the most Duolingo-like polish of the serious contenders, beautiful interactive lessons and a habit loop, with the common criticism that it samples topics rather than building a complete, connected foundation. Khan Academy remains the free encyclopedia: comprehensive, trustworthy lessons, with the sequencing left to you, which is why “what order do I do it in” is its communities’ eternal question. Math Academy is the heavyweight: rigorous, adaptive, demanding, paid, and fixed-rail; our full comparison is here. All four are real answers for the right person, and we would rather you pick the right one than pick us wrongly.
The structural bit: maths punishes streaks differently
Here is why the question keeps being asked even though apps keep existing. In a language, knowledge is a net: holes are annoying but the net still catches fish. In maths, knowledge is a tower: one missing floor and everything above it wobbles, regardless of how many days in a row you showed up. A streak model on its own happily marches you forward over a hole, and the app cheerfully reports progress while understanding quietly collapses. The missing ingredient is not gamification. It is a map of what stands on what, consulted before every next step.
So: which one should you use?
If you want five pleasant minutes of mental maths a day, Duolingo Math is free and does exactly that. If polish and curiosity keep you going, Brilliant earns its subscription for many people. If you are disciplined, funded, and want maximum rigour on a fixed rail, Math Academy. If you want free lessons and can manage your own path, Khan Academy plus a retention system. And if your honest situation is “I don’t know where I stand, what I’m missing, or what order to go in”, that is the diagnosis-and-sequencing problem, it is the reason most maths comebacks stall, and it is the specific problem Consiliae exists to solve: the map, the scan, and review built in, free to start, no account needed to look.
Questions
- Is there an app like Duolingo but for maths?
- Several. Duolingo itself has Duolingo Math (free, mental-maths focused, fairly shallow). Brilliant offers polished interactive lessons with a Duolingo-like feel. Khan Academy is free and comprehensive but self-directed. Math Academy is a rigorous paid daily-training system. Consiliae maps all of maths as a prerequisite graph with a placement scan and built-in review. Which fits depends on whether you want a habit, a curriculum, or a diagnosis.
- Is Duolingo Math any good?
- For daily mental-arithmetic practice, it's pleasant and free. It is not trying to be a complete maths education: coverage is narrow, there's no real diagnostic, and it won't take you from fractions to calculus. Treat it as a warm-up app, not a curriculum.
- What is the best app to relearn maths as an adult?
- It depends on your actual blocker. If you need structure and lessons: Khan Academy, free. If you need motivation and polish: Brilliant. If you need a demanding daily regimen: Math Academy. If your blocker is not knowing where to start, what order to go in, or how to make it stick, that's the diagnosis-and-sequencing problem, and it's the specific one Consiliae was built for.
- Why do streak apps not work for maths the way they do for languages?
- Languages tolerate gaps: miss the word for 'apple' and you can still order coffee. Maths compounds: miss one prerequisite and everything built on it stops making sense, no matter how long your streak is. A maths app needs to know what depends on what, and route around your specific gaps. Streaks measure showing up; maths also needs the map.