Magoosh Alternatives: Price Is Rarely the Real Reason

Magoosh is the cheapest name in four of the six tables where it compares itself to rivals, and it publishes the two it loses: $219 against $499 for the GRE, $349 against $1599 for the GMAT. Price is rarely why anyone leaves. Three reasons hold up instead. You want a live human teaching you, you want more of the material the test maker publishes, or your exam is not one of the eight Magoosh sells.

That inversion matters, because the standard article about replacing Magoosh opens with a list of cheaper products. Almost nobody needs one. The useful question is what Magoosh is missing for you specifically, and the honest answers are few enough to count on one hand.

Everything below was read off the vendor pages on 11 September 2026, and every figure names the page that carried it. Prices move, sales end, and one of the findings here is specifically about a sale, so treat each number as a dated observation and check the link before you spend anything.

Is Magoosh actually the expensive option?

Mostly no, and you do not need a reviewer to tell you so. Five of the eight plans pages carry a table headed "How Magoosh stacks up against other options", IELTS carries a sixth under its own heading, and LSAT and MCAT publish none at all. Magoosh is listed first in every one of the six, and holds the lowest price in four:

• GRE. The GRE plans page lists Magoosh at $219, Princeton Review at $499, Kaplan at $499 and Manhattan at $599, with 6 months of online access against 4, 6 and 6.
• GMAT. The GMAT plans page lists Magoosh at $349 with 12 months of access, against Kaplan at $1599, Princeton Review at $799 and Target Test Prep at $649, all with 6 months or less.
• SAT. The SAT plans page lists Magoosh at $129 against Kaplan at $199, Princeton Review at $299 and PrepScholar at $397.
• ACT. The ACT plans page lists Magoosh at $129 against Acely at $588, Princeton Review at $299 and PrepScholar at $495.
• TOEFL, the exception. The TOEFL plans page lists Magoosh at $129 against BestMyTest at $209, TST Prp at $197 and Notefull at $120. Notefull is cheaper, and where Magoosh offers 6 months of access that row reads "Lifetime".
• IELTS, the other exception. The IELTS plans page drops the usual heading for "Magoosh Gives You More" and lists Magoosh at $129 against BestMyTest at $169, Kaplan at $190, E2Language at $219 and edX at $99. edX is cheaper, though its access row reads "Only 8 Weeks" against 6 months.

The two losing tables are mirror images, which is the interesting part. Notefull beats Magoosh on price and on access, holding the material for a lifetime. edX beats it on price and loses badly on access, expiring in eight weeks. Magoosh published both anyway, on pages selling the product each table undercuts, and that is a reasonable reason to trust the four it wins.

Read those with the obvious caution: they are the seller comparing itself to its rivals, on a date the page never states, over rows the seller chose. Go and price any competitor on that competitor site before you believe a figure here. The direction of travel still holds up, though, and the homepage is unembarrassed about it. Magoosh leads with "More than 10 Million Students Have Said Hello to Stress-Free Studying" and a mission to give every student access to test prep tools that are "effective, affordable, and engaging". Cheap is plainly the strategy, on the company account of itself.

So if you arrived here because Magoosh felt expensive, the likelier problem is that test prep costs money and $129 is real money, which is where the catalogue starts. Switching will not fix that. The rest of this page is for the other reasons.

Nobody paid the list price on the day I checked

A sitewide sale was running across the whole catalogue on 11 September 2026, and the catalogue did not get one sale. Five exam pages carried a banner reading "Biggest sale of the year! 30% off all study plans with code" PERSIST30: GRE, SAT, ACT, LSAT and MCAT. The remaining three carried the same sentence at "50% off all study plans with code" DILIGENT50: GMAT, TOEFL and IELTS. Same company, same day, and a discount two thirds larger depending on which exam you happen to be sitting. On the $129 plan that both TOEFL and SAT sell, that is $64.50 off against $38.70.

Five plans pages had the arithmetic already done on the card, with the old figure struck through. GRE Premium read $104.30 beside a "Regular price: $149", the 6-month plan $125.30 beside $179, and Premium + Admissions $153.30 beside $219. SAT and ACT Premium each read $90.30 beside a "Regular price: $129", and the $399 class plans $279.30. GMAT, on the bigger code, read $124.50, $174.50 and $224.50 against $249, $349 and $449. TOEFL read $54.50 and $64.50 against a "Regular price: $109" and a "Regular price: $129".

The other three did not show the code's arithmetic. The LSAT cards sat at $199 and $499 and the MCAT plans page at $379 and $399, each a single figure with no reduction beside it, under a banner advertising the code. IELTS is stranger again: its cards do carry a crossed-out figure, $129 struck beside $109 and $774 struck beside $129, and neither pair is the advertised 50%, which would have put those plans at $64.50 and $387. Alone among the pages quoted here it shows no "ON SALE" flag and names no regular price, so there is nothing to say the struck $774 was ever charged. The one page that shows you a saving shows you a different saving from the one in its own banner.

Which is the practical point. One reading on one day proves that Magoosh discounts, that the discount is uneven across exams, and that a card cannot be trusted to tell you what the code does. It proves nothing at all about whether any code will be live when you read this. Before you pay a listed figure, open the page, read the banner, and try the code at checkout.

The LSAT plan carries a $124 surcharge no refund can reach

This is the sharpest surprise in the Magoosh catalogue, and it is printed on the page rather than buried, which is precisely how it keeps catching people out. The LSAT plans page prices Premium at $199, with a line under the figure reading "+ one-time $124 LawHub Advantage fee". That is $323 at checkout. The guided-study plan above it is $499 under the same line, so $623.

The page explains why: "LSAC requires every student who enrolls in a prep course to purchase LawHub Advantage. The fee goes to LSAC." Then the refund FAQ on the same page draws the line that matters. Of the $124 portion it says "we are unable to refund this portion of the plan, as it is paid to LSAC", while adding that "it is yours to keep for 12 months from the time of purchase". The refund window itself is short and generous inside its limits: "email us within 7 days of purchasing" buys a full refund of the Magoosh half, no questions asked.

Put those together and the LSAT plan is the one Magoosh product where the score guarantee cannot make you whole. A learner who completes the programme, misses the promised increase and claims the refund gets $199 back on a $323 purchase.

Be fair about what the $124 buys. Magoosh describes LawHub Advantage as "a library of over 60 official LSAT exams given on prior test dates", and that is the real thing on the real interface. LSAC sells it too. Its LawHub page says "A LawHub account is free", prices the upgrade at $124 a year, and promises it will "Maximize your LSAT preparation with an extensive library of Official LSAT PrepTests". Note the difference in wording, because it is easy to flatten. LSAC sells an annual subscription; Magoosh charges for it once inside its own transaction and calls it a one-time fee. You are buying a year of LSAC access through a reseller, and you keep it whatever happens to the Magoosh half.

The planning consequence is simple. Budget $323, decide in the first week, and if you already hold LawHub Advantage, say so at sign-up, since the page offers a separate route for exactly that case. Our LSAT study plan assumes you have LawHub either way, because the official PrepTests are the spine of any serious LSAT schedule.

Eight exams, eight guarantees, and seven of them want a score you already have

Magoosh advertises a score guarantee on all eight exams, and a reader comparing them across exams is comparing eight unrelated promises. Seven of them also rest on a condition that is easy to miss until you try to claim: you have to walk in holding a previous official score. IELTS is the one exception, and it is the clearest evidence that these promises were never built to be compared.

The GRE score-guarantee page spells the condition out in a way the plan pages do not. Its requirements list opens "You must have taken the exam before studying with Magoosh", adds that the old score must be valid and "less than 5 years old", and asks you to email a copy of the before score report at sign-up. Asked what happens if you have never sat the exam, the page answers that you can still use Magoosh, and that you will not be "eligible for the score guarantee". It also lists what completing the programme means in practice: "Watch all of the lesson videos", "Complete all of the Magoosh practice questions", and "Watch the video explanations for all the questions you answer incorrectly".

Five more exams carry the same condition in their FAQs, in plainer words. SAT promises a "100 point increase over your old scores (as long as you scored a 1350 or below)". ACT promises a "4 point increase over your old scores (as long as you scored a 30 or below)". The LSAT FAQ uses the same phrase about an "increase over your old scores", the MCAT page promises a 10-point rise or your money back, and TOEFL promises a "4 point increase over your old score", whose guarantee page opens its requirements with "You must have taken the TOEFL before" and then shortens the window: "Your previous score must be less than 2 years old".

The GMAT headline needs unpacking on its own, because "up to 70 points" is the best case at the bottom of a sliding scale. Its guarantee page publishes a seven-step ladder keyed to what you scored before, from a "70-point increase if you originally scored up to 575" down through 60, 50, 40, 30 and 20 to a "10-point increase if you originally scored between 635-655". It also requires that "You must have taken the GMAT Focus before" and that "Your exam date must be at least 3 months from your purchase date". A candidate sitting at 640 and hoping the guarantee covers a 70-point jump is owed 10.

IELTS is built the other way round, and it is the row worth reading twice. Its plans page sells a "Target Band Score Guarantee", and the guarantee page asks you to "Tell us your target score" and to "Make sure you send us your target band score before your exam date". You claim by completing the requirements and not achieving that "target band score on your official test". The prerequisite is a number you nominate, so a first-time IELTS candidate is covered where a first-time GRE candidate is not. One promise out of eight shaped unlike the other seven is the whole argument against reading these as a single feature.

So on seven of the eight exams, two groups should stop treating the guarantee as part of what they are buying. A first-time test taker has nothing to improve on. A strong scorer already above the ceiling (1350 on the SAT, 30 on the ACT, 320 on the GRE, 655 on the GMAT) is above the promise as well. For both, the cover that remains is the money-back window, which is genuinely good: the GRE table carries a No Questions Asked Money-Back Guarantee row that Magoosh ticks and Princeton Review, Kaplan and Manhattan do not, and the SAT, ACT, LSAT and MCAT pages each set the window by telling you to "email us within 7 days of purchasing". If you are a first-timer working out a timeline, the GRE study plan and the GMAT study plan both assume a diagnostic before any purchase, which is the sequence that would have earned you the guarantee anyway.

If you want a live human teaching you, Magoosh is the wrong shape

This is the first reason to leave that survives contact with the price list. Magoosh is video plus written explanations plus email support, and its class add-ons are recordings.

On the SAT and ACT pages the top tier is "Premium + On-Demand Classes" at $399. The SAT version buys 18 hours "of supplemental instruction on key topics" led by a "99th-percentile SAT instructor", and the ACT version 16 hours on the same terms. Both pages call them "our recorded classes". The LSAT page is blunter still: its classes section explains that the plan includes "eight 2-hour recorded classes", each with an assignment to complete alone. Neither the GRE nor the GMAT page offers a class tier among its three plans, though both guarantee pages answer a question about plans that include on-demand classes and quote a software-only refund ("$179" on GRE, "$249" on GMAT), so the tier exists somewhere even where the plans page will not sell you one. Human contact on those two is a tooltip promising "Quick email and chat support for when you" get stuck.

None of that is a criticism of the recordings, which is how Magoosh reaches its price. It is simply the wrong product if what you need is somebody who answers a question in the moment, watches you work, and notices the habit you cannot see. Two routes out:

• Pay for the brand-name course. The brands people mean by a course with a teacher on it are the ones Magoosh keeps putting in its own tables, priced there at $499 (Princeton Review GRE), $799 (Princeton Review GMAT), $299 (Princeton Review SAT and ACT), $499 (Kaplan GRE) and $1599 (Kaplan GMAT). Those are Magoosh figures, gathered on an unstated date, and the rows cover price and access length without saying whether any course is taught live, so open the vendor page and confirm the format and the hours before you buy. On these numbers a brand-name course runs roughly two to five times the Magoosh price.
• For the SAT, get it free. College Board lists Official SAT Tutoring at Schoolhouse.world on its own practice hub, inviting students to "Join free, live, small-group tutoring sessions led by trained peer tutors". Live, small-group, human, and $0. The SAT is unusually well served that way, and none of the graduate-exam pages cited here points to anything comparable.

If you want more official test-maker material, go to the source

Start by giving Magoosh its due, because on three exams it licenses the real items and says so plainly. The GRE plans page advertises "8 full sections worth of licensed official GRE® questions from ETS", and its table marks an Official Content row as included for Magoosh and a dash for Princeton Review, Kaplan and Manhattan. The ACT page has an Official ACT Questions row with the same shape, backed by a tooltip promising "Over 3800 official ACT® questions" created by ACT and used under licence. The LSAT plans bundle LSAC material because LSAC requires it, and the TOEFL table carries an Official ETS Questions row ticked for Magoosh and dashed for all three of its named rivals. The SAT, GMAT, MCAT and IELTS pages carry no equivalent licensed-content row.

Licensed volume is finite, though. If you do work through those 8 sections, you have run out of third-party official content and the test maker itself is the only supplier left:

• GRE. ETS invites you to "Try our free POWERPREP Online practice tests", which are "One untimed, full-length practice test" and "One timed, full-length practice test". Beyond those, POWERPREP PLUS Online is listed at "$44.95" "per practice test". Three of those come to $134.85, which is less than the $149 Magoosh lists for one month of GRE Premium, and every question in them is ETS material.
• SAT and PSAT. College Board tells students to "find your free practice resources here" and to "Take a free, full-length practice test on Bluebook". Its Student Question Bank "contains thousands of real SAT and PSAT questions created by the makers of the actual tests". For this exam a paid third-party bank is a supplement to free official material, and buying it first is the common mistake.
• MCAT. The AAMC prepare page says "Prepare for the exam with AAMC MCAT Official Prep products written by the test developers", and its Fee Assistance Program benefits include "discounted fees, free MCAT Official Prep products, and more". If money is the constraint, that programme is a better first stop than any discount code. The MCAT study plan sequences the official full-lengths against everything else.
• LSAT. LSAC states that "A LawHub account is free", with Advantage at $124 a year for the PrepTest library. If you are self-studying with no course at all, you can buy that directly and skip the prep-company layer entirely.

If your exam is not one of the eight Magoosh sells

The Magoosh homepage lists GRE, GMAT, SAT, ACT, TOEFL, IELTS, MCAT and LSAT. Outside those eight there is no Magoosh product at any price, and no discount code changes that. It is the largest gap in the category, and swapping vendors does not close it: nobody sells practice for an exam written by one department off its own reading list, because no publisher has ever seen that reading list.

It catches a lot of adults. A funded PhD student sitting a departmental qualifying exam. A mid-career accountant working towards a certification with no commercial prep industry behind it. A nursing student facing a programme exam written in-house. Anyone whose paper comes from a lecturer and their own slides. None of those people has a question bank to buy, and all of them already hold the only material that matters.

The unflattering half belongs first. GeniusPal holds no GRE bank, no GMAT bank, no licensed ETS or ACT items, no video library, and no score guarantee of any kind. Nothing inside it is mapped to a published exam framework, because a departmental paper has no published framework to map to. Six weeks out from the GRE and wanting the "1600+ Practice Questions" that page advertises across its whole bank, you are describing Magoosh Premium at $149, and that is what you should buy.

Its one job is reading what you hand over. Feed it lecture slides, a PDF chapter, typed notes or a URL, and it writes questions against those exact pages. Rounds come back scored, and a daily review built out of your own misses across the whole account runs at no cost on every tier. Four hundred pages of reading that no publisher has ever written a practice question for leaves a catalogue with nothing to sell you. Our guide to preparing for comprehensive exams covers the reading schedule that has to sit under any of this.

Hand over last year’s paper for the same exam and it measures the proportions of that paper, then draws fresh questions off your notes to match. Testing put the effect on long-form written questions and not on multiple-choice stems, and a measurement of a paper already taken claims nothing about the one you are about to take.

Genius costs $59.99 for a year, shown as $5.00 a month, beneath a fair-use ceiling. Student is $14.99 a month for 100 generations, sets reaching 30 questions, and flashcards and typed active recall over a set you already own. Free is the one to read carefully: 2 generations for the life of the account with nothing topping them up later, sets of 10 questions, 2 sittings of each, and one past-paper reading on those same lifetime terms. Check any machine-written question against the source page before you revise off it.

Match the destination to the reason

• You thought it was expensive. It is the cheapest name in four of its six comparison tables, undercut by Notefull on TOEFL and edX on IELTS. Check the banner for a code and stay.
• You want a teacher. A brand-name course at roughly two to five times the price in Magoosh figures, where Princeton Review never passes 2.32x and 4.58x is Kaplan GMAT alone. Or Schoolhouse.world, free through College Board, if your exam is the SAT.
• You want official questions. ETS POWERPREP, College Board Bluebook and the Student Question Bank, AAMC Official Prep, LSAC LawHub. College Board gives its away, and ETS hands you two full-length tests before it charges.
• You are sitting the LSAT. Budget $323, decide inside 7 days, and know that $124 of it is unrefundable and yours for a year regardless.
• You are a first-time test taker. On seven of the eight exams the guarantee wants a previous official score, so buy on the content and discount the promise. IELTS is the exception, since its guarantee runs off a target band you nominate.
• Your exam is not on the list of eight. Nothing in this market has read your syllabus. Point software at the documents you already hold instead.