ALEKS vs Aristotle

ALEKS is a learning service offering adaptive learning, guided lessons, and gamified practice. Individual subscriptions give students access to all courses, but only one course at a time. The service lists parent reporting and runs on the web, Windows, macOS, iPad/iOS, and Android tablets. Offline access is not available. There is no free plan. The 1-Month plan costs $19.95 a month; the 3-Months plan costs $49.95 a month; the 6-Months plan costs $99.95 a month; and the 12-Months plan costs $179.95 a month. ALEKS was founded in 1999. Its listed features combine adaptive study with guided lesson content and practice, while parent reporting provides a listed reporting feature for families. The subscription structure offers several durations, with the same one-course-at-a-time limit described for individual access across the plans.

Aristotle is a web-based personal AI tutor for students from 6th through 12th grade. It offers voice lessons across subjects: the tutor speaks, listens live and can be interrupted. Rather than simply supplying answers, it asks questions to uncover gaps in understanding. An interactive whiteboard supports drawn steps, diagrams and images, and learners can upload PDFs and images, including long textbooks. The service advertises 65 subjects, including middle-school math, AP exams and SAT/ACT preparation. It tracks skills, mistakes and mastery, remembers prior sessions and preferred explanations, and gives parents a dashboard, lesson transcripts and session summaries. Its safety measures include guidance during lessons, a separate safety check, automatic post-session review and human review of flagged conversations. Aristotle says it does not keep raw voice recordings or sell family data. The free Intro plan provides three one-hour sessions. Scholar costs $49 a month for eight monthly sessions; Infinite costs $199 a month for unlimited sessions. Teachers and classrooms can access it free after verification.