A Khan Academy alternative for when you need the syllabus, not the videos
A disclosure to start: Consiliae is ours, so read this as a considered argument rather than a neutral review. The short version is that Khan Academy is free, generous, and genuinely good at explaining, and that it leaves one large job to you: designing the curriculum.
Updated September 2026
Why Khan Academy is the right default for so many people
Khan Academy is a non-profit library of video lessons and practice exercises that covers essentially all of school maths and a fair stretch beyond it, and it costs nothing. That sentence is remarkable and it deserves to be said plainly before any comparison starts. The explanations are patient, the exercises give instant feedback, and for a very large number of people it was the first time maths was explained without anyone sighing at them.
If you are a school student following a set course, a parent helping with homework, or a learner who already knows exactly which topic is giving them trouble, Khan Academy is probably the right first stop, and nothing on this page should talk you out of it. Search the topic, watch the video, do the exercises, move on. The library model works beautifully when you already know which shelf you need.
The comparison only becomes interesting when you do not know which shelf you need. That is the situation this page is about.
The Khan Academy problem: you are the curriculum designer
A library gives you the books. It does not tell you which one you are ready for, which one you skipped, or which one you should reread before the exam. On Khan Academy the courses are organised by grade and by topic, and you choose your entry point by guessing your level. Once inside, you can watch anything in any order. Nothing checks that the skills a lesson leans on are actually in place. Within a single course, Mastery Challenges do bring back a few earlier skills, six questions across three skills at a time, but nothing reaches across courses to check that the foundations from an earlier course still hold. Placement and ordering belong entirely to you, and review does the moment you leave a course.
The trouble is that the gaps you most need to find are the ones you cannot see. Some patterns that come up again and again with returning adults:
- A learner who wants calculus starts at the calculus course, because that is the goal, and stalls on the chain rule. The actual problem is that simplifying algebraic fractions was never secure. No calculus video mentions this, because from inside calculus it is assumed.
- A learner who feels shaky on fractions watches the whole fractions unit, scores well, and moves on. Two weeks later they cannot solve a linear equation with a fractional coefficient. The unit tested fractions in isolation; the equation needed fractions and inverse operations together, and nobody scheduled that combination.
- A learner comfortable with arithmetic decides to skip the early algebra videos as too basic, and is later baffled by why negative exponents behave the way they do. The rule was stated in the video they skipped. The library did not object to the skip because it has no way of knowing it mattered.
None of these people were lazy or careless. They were doing the job of a curriculum designer without the one thing a curriculum designer has: a map of which idea depends on which. We wrote a longer piece on what order to do Khan Academy maths in, and the honest summary is that the order is knowable but the library will not show it to you.
| Aspect | Khan Academy | Consiliae |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A non-profit library of video lessons and practice exercises organised by grade and course. You choose what to watch and when. | A route rather than a library: short written explanations, then freshly generated problems, in an order computed from a prerequisite map for the goal you chose. |
| What it costs | Free. Run by a non-profit; the maths library has no paid tier. The optional Khanmigo AI tutor is $4 a month for learners and families. | Free during public beta, no card needed. Paid plans arrive after beta at about $9.99 a month for an individual, with no contract. |
| Finding your level | Each maths course has a Course Challenge of up to about 40 questions, but nothing walks the whole subject, so you still pick your entry point by guessing. | One placement scan walks the whole subject in at most 25 questions, ends early once it is confident, and needs no account. |
| What stops you carrying a gap forward | Nothing locks a topic until you have shown its prerequisites; you can watch anything in any order, and the library has no way of knowing a skip mattered. | Every concept sits on a dependency graph, so a missing skill shows up as an edge, and the path to your goal drops only what you already hold. |
| Bringing back last year's topics | Mastery Challenges give spaced review of skills within one maths course, six questions across three skills at a time. Nothing reaches across courses. | Spaced repetition schedules earlier concepts back before they fade, whichever part of the map they came from. |
| Breadth | Very broad. Nearly two decades of content across maths and many other subjects. | Narrower and maths-only for now: 1,424 concepts, every one placed on the same graph, from foundations through school maths into early university. |
The Khan Academy verdict for the adult who watched for a month
Here is the person this page is really for. You are an adult, maths finished for you ten or more years ago, and you want it back, perhaps for a course, a career change, or simply because it bothers you that it went. You did the sensible thing: opened Khan Academy, picked a course that sounded about right, and put in a month of evenings. The videos made sense. The exercises mostly went fine. And at the end of the month you still cannot answer the only question that matters: what do I actually know?
That is not a failure of effort and it is not a failure of the videos. It is the predictable result of studying without a diagnostic. Recognising an explanation is not the same as being able to produce the method cold, and a month of nodding along produces a lot of recognition. Meanwhile the gaps from ten years ago are still exactly where they were, because nothing went looking for them. If this is you, the question is Khan Academy enough has a clear answer: it is enough to explain, and it is not enough to place you, order you, or check on you later.
Our verdict, stated as fairly as we can: stay with Khan Academy if you have a syllabus in hand and simply want each topic explained well. Look for an alternative if the thing you are missing is the syllabus itself.
How Consiliae answers the Khan Academy question
Consiliae starts where the library leaves off, with the three jobs it hands back to you. First, a placement scan. Rather than asking which course sounds right, it asks you a short sequence of questions that walks the subject and finds your actual frontier, including the gaps from years ago you had stopped noticing. It is at most 25 questions, ends early once it is confident, and needs no account.
Second, a knowledge map you can see. Every concept sits on a prerequisite graph, so the chain rule visibly depends on algebraic fractions, and algebraic fractions visibly depend on what comes before them. You can browse the whole map without signing up. When you set a goal, the path from where you are to that goal is computed for you, walking back through the prerequisites and removing the ones you already hold, so you only study what is actually missing.
Third, spaced review that is scheduled, not remembered. Earlier concepts come back for a quick check before they would have faded, so mastery is maintained rather than assumed. The lessons themselves are short explanations followed by problems generated fresh each time, with wrong answers explained in practice and reviews. The catalogue is smaller than an eighteen-year-old library: 1,424 maths concepts, from foundations through school maths into early university, and still growing. What it never does is leave the sequencing to you.
Questions
- Does Khan Academy tell you where to start in maths?
- Not for the subject as a whole. Khan Academy organises content by course and grade. Each maths course has a Course Challenge, a test of up to about 40 questions that awards mastery credit for the skills in that one course, but there is no single diagnostic that walks the whole of maths and reports which foundations you have and which you are missing. You still pick the course by guessing your level. A returning adult usually guesses too high or too low, and either way the gaps stay invisible.
- Why do I feel like I am not making progress on Khan Academy?
- The usual cause is not effort, it is sequencing. Watching a clear video feels like learning, but if the lesson leans on a skill you never secured, the difficulty shows up two or three topics later with no label on it. Because nothing on Khan Academy locks a topic until you have shown its prerequisites, you can spend a month busy and still be building on sand. The fix is to find the actual gaps first, then study in dependency order.
- Is Khan Academy free, and is Consiliae free too?
- Khan Academy is free. It is run by a non-profit and the maths library costs nothing. Consiliae is free during public beta: the knowledge map, the Knowledge Scan, lessons, quizzes and reviews all cost nothing, no card is required, and you can browse the map and take the scan without an account. Paid plans come after beta, priced for individuals at about $9.99 a month, with no contract and beta learners keeping the beta price for life. Price is not really the deciding axis between the two; who does the sequencing and the checking is.
- Can I use Consiliae alongside Khan Academy?
- Yes. Use Consiliae to find out where you stand, to see which prerequisites are missing, and to hold the review schedule. Keep Khan Academy open as a second voice when an explanation does not land. The two do not compete for the same job: one is the spine, the other is a very good reference shelf.
- What is the best Khan Academy alternative for adults relearning maths?
- It depends on what went wrong the first time. If the problem was the explanations, another library will not help much, because Khan Academy's explanations are already good. If the problem was not knowing what you had forgotten and in what order to fix it, you want something with a placement diagnostic, a visible prerequisite map, and built-in spaced review. That is the gap Consiliae was built to fill.