Physics and Maths Tutor Alternatives: 6 Sites Compared

The best Physics and Maths Tutor alternatives are Cognito for free video lessons with marked exam questions, Seneca Learning for interactive courses tied to your specification, Save My Exams for teacher-written notes behind a membership, your own exam board for the papers PMT is mirroring, Anki for scheduling, and GeniusPal for turning a PDF you already downloaded into questions. PMT itself is free, so price is never the reason to leave.

That last point is worth sitting with before reading a list of replacements, because it makes this comparison unusual. Most alternatives roundups exist because something got expensive. Nothing on physicsandmathstutor.com costs anything, and nothing asks you to make an account. So the honest question is not what to escape to. It is which specific job PMT hands back to you, and which tool is willing to do that job instead.

Is Physics and Maths Tutor free?

Yes, and unconditionally. The site publishes past papers, mark schemes, revision notes, questions sorted by topic, flashcards, mind maps and worksheets for GCSE, IGCSE and A-Level, and PMT states it plainly in its own guide to the site: you do not need to create an account, all of the resources are completely free and available without registration, and they can be downloaded or printed at home. No trial clock, no metered chapter, no card details.

There is a paid side to the organisation, and it sits entirely outside the library. PMT Education sells private tuition, advertised from twenty pounds an hour, and online crash courses, and it funds bursary places for students who cannot pay. None of that touches the resources themselves. Once you know that, the shape of your search changes: you are not looking for something cheaper, you are looking for something that does more of the work.

What does Physics and Maths Tutor actually give you?

More than most people who use it realise. Its own resource guide lists past papers and mark schemes for all the major boards, revision notes and topic summaries, past paper questions grouped by topic (the QBTs students live on), flashcards, mind maps, glossaries, formula and cheat sheets, worksheets with solutions, essay plans and example essays, examiner reports for some boards, video walkthroughs and model solutions, and Solution Banks for Edexcel A-Level and International A-Level Maths. Coverage runs well past the name: Maths, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Geography, English, Psychology and Computer Science all have their own sections.

The unifying property of every item on that list is that it is a file. Even the flashcards, which sound interactive, are not. Open the AQA A-Level Physics fields flashcards and the option you are offered is Download as pdf. That is a genuine strength for anyone who revises on paper, and it is also the exact boundary of what the site will ever do for you.

Why look for a Physics and Maths Tutor alternative?

Four reasons come up repeatedly, and none of them is a complaint about quality:

• Nothing on the site tests you. You download a question set, attempt it on paper, then download the mark scheme and grade yourself. That loop works, and it collapses the moment you are tired, because the site has no opinion about whether you skipped it.
• Nothing keeps score. There is no record of which topics you failed, so revision planning falls entirely to you and to whatever you remember about last week.
• Nothing comes back. A topic you got wrong in October will reappear only if you personally decide to open that PDF again in November. Forgetting is silent, which is what makes it dangerous.
• It knows the specification, not your class. PMT is organised around exam board content, so the booklet your teacher wrote, the practical you actually did, and the seminar handout with the odd emphasis on it are all invisible to it.

The 6 best Physics and Maths Tutor alternatives

1. Cognito: free like PMT, and it marks you

Cognito is the closest thing to a Physics and Maths Tutor that grades your work. Its site advertises video lessons, revision notes and exam questions for every topic, more than 1.5 million quiz questions, flashcard decks you build yourself, AI marking on exam-style questions and progress tracking, across GCSE, A-Level, IB and AP for ten exam boards including AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, CIE and SQA. It is free, and students say so in the testimonials it publishes. Treat the headline claims about grade improvement as marketing rather than evidence, because they are self-reported. The reason to try it is structural: it closes steps three and four of the loop above without asking for money, which is a rare combination in UK revision.

2. Seneca Learning: interactive courses matched to your specification

Where PMT hands you a document, Seneca walks you through the content in short interactive blocks and asks questions as it goes. Its own site describes courses matched to your curriculum, over 8,000 exam questions with AI marking and immediate feedback, an AI tutor named Amelia, homework upload for guided support, and gamified levelling, spanning KS3, GCSE, iGCSE, A-Level, International A-Level, IB, BTEC and primary. Its pricing FAQ states that Seneca can be used for free an unlimited amount, with Premium packages adding extra features and exam support on top. The trade is depth: the fast, curriculum-led format that makes it easy to start is thinner than a PMT booklet when you need the full working on a hard question. Our guide to Seneca Learning alternatives covers what to reach for when that happens.

3. Save My Exams: teacher-written notes, behind a membership

Save My Exams is the paid counterpart to PMT and the one most students compare it with. Its own navigation lists revision notes, exam questions, past papers, flashcards, target tests, mock exams and newer smart lessons, covering GCSE, IGCSE and AS-Level across AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Cambridge and WJEC. The material is written and checked by teachers and examiners, which is the argument for paying when a mark scheme leaves you guessing what the examiner wanted. Membership terms and what a free account can reach have changed more than once, so read the current terms on its own site rather than trusting a figure quoted in a review, and cancel a trial you are not going to continue. Our Save My Exams alternatives guide lays out the cheaper routes to the same practice.

4. Your exam board: the primary source PMT is mirroring

Most students never go here, and it is free. AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC publish their own past papers and mark schemes, and going direct removes any doubt about whether a paper matches the current specification. Know the limits before you rely on it. AQA states that most past papers, mark schemes and examiner reports stay on its public website for a period of three years, with a longer window on Centre Services, the secure extranet only schools and colleges can reach, and that papers downloaded from there must be kept secure and used inside the institution. That is precisely why PMT is so useful: it holds older material together with the specification content in one place. Use the board for authority, and PMT for depth.

5. Anki: the scheduling PMT flashcards cannot do

A PMT flashcard PDF is a set of prompts. Anki is the machine that decides when you see each one again. You rate how hard a card was to recall, and that rating alone sets the next interval, so material you have secured quietly disappears for months while anything shaky keeps returning. Nothing else in this list takes that job seriously, and nothing else is less interested in looking friendly: expect a plain interface and expect to supply the cards, by importing a shared deck or typing them out. It is free on desktop, Android and the web, and funded by a one-off charge on iPhone. Our roundup of the best spaced repetition apps compares the schedulers if the interface puts you off.

6. GeniusPal: turn the PDF you just downloaded into questions

This one pairs with Physics and Maths Tutor rather than replacing it, and the pairing is the point. Take the notes PDF, the flashcard file or the topic booklet you just saved, upload it, and pick how you want to be tested on it: a quiz, a deck of flashcards, or a recall drill that withholds the answer until you have written yours from memory. Because every question descends from the file you supplied, it works just as well on the handout your own teacher wrote, which no revision site will ever carry. It accepts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Markdown, CSV and plain text up to 10 MB. The gaps are real and worth naming: there is no library to browse, no past paper archive, no marking against an official scheme, and it writes no notes, no summaries and no mind maps of its own. Free accounts get two generations for the lifetime of the account, so treat it as an audit of the output rather than a term plan, and run one PDF through it as flashcards to see whether the questions look like ones an examiner would set. Past the free two, it is $14.99 a month for 100 generations or $59.99 for a year.

How the six compare

Which Physics and Maths Tutor alternative should you choose?

Pick by the step of the loop that keeps breaking, never by which site lists more features:

• You download plenty and revise little: the missing piece is marking. Cognito and Seneca both grade you for free, and being told you were wrong is far harder to ignore than grading yourself.
• You mark yourself but cannot read the mark scheme: that is worth paying a teacher-written product for, whether that is Save My Exams or a tutor.
• You revise a topic well and forget it by mocks: no revision site solves this. A scheduler does, and Anki remains the serious answer.
• Your teacher sets material PMT does not have: a generator that reads your own file is the only category that reaches it, because a specification-shaped library never will.

One test settles this faster than any comparison table. Take a single topic you have to know by next week, download the PMT questions for it, and then, before you look at the mark scheme, run the same topic through one of the tools above and let it ask you. Compare how you did. Most students find the gap between recognising the material and retrieving it is much wider than they expected, and that gap is the entire argument for adding anything to a site that already gives away everything it has. If you want a wider shortlist first, our roundup of the best revision apps for GCSE and A-Level ranks the field by what each one is genuinely good at.