Preply is a mixed-choice global marketplace: great for individual independent tutors seeking schedule freedom, but less ideal for traditional language schools or multi-tutor businesses looking for corporate scale or brand ownership.
This Preply review will give you a balanced perspective about everything you need to learn about Preply. Whether you already run a tutoring business or you’re just starting out as a tutor, this review will help you make an informed decision.
Preply is a marketplace for tutors and students for live, 1-to-1 sessions. So on the one hand you have tutors with diverse backgrounds and experience and on the other, you have students looking for tutors who can help them learn. While Preply is most known for teaching languages, it also has tutors who can help students for hobbies, maths, science, business, arts, music and more.
Preply is a marketplace rather than a strong, comprehensive tutoring software. Many tutors start here because of the relative ease of finding students. Growing businesses have different requirements, many of which Preply cannot meet.
Individual experiences can be very different across different tutors, organizations, and students. Hence, while this Preply review focuses mostly on recurring views, isolated observations have not been entirely ignored.
We begin with a quick look at the pros and cons of Preply. Next, we explain how we analyzed Preply reviews. From there, we look at things users consistently praise as well as limitations mentioned by tutors. We also note how Preply is a different experience based on whether you are a student, tutor, a tutoring business, or a full-fledged language school.
Importantly, we point out where Preply is a good choice, where it falls short and how EdisonOS compares. Then we conclude with FAQs.
Preply has several advantages and disadvantages. For instance, it is an attractive option if you are a beginner who prefers not to invest a lot right now; it is not meant for larger operations.
Understanding pros and cons will be easier through a table.
We explored different review sites and discussion platforms to understand some of the positive aspects of Preply. We also checked some tutor communities and videos to see if those positive experiences echoed elsewhere too.
Here’s what tutors have repeatedly liked most about Preply:
Some Reddit users said they joined Preply to build confidence for tutoring. A few others mentioned that certified tutors have a clear advantage.
Our Preply review uses publicly available Preply documents to make sure the complaints or limitations that tutors have mentioned are accurate. Here are the most common limitations of Preply that tutors and tutoring businesses have repeatedly mentioned:
For every new student you teach, you get zero fees for the trial lesson. This is true for all tutors, no matter how long you’ve been teaching at Preply. “The commission for every trial lesson with a new student is 100%.”, says the Preply commission policy.
Nearly all reviews mentioned that Preply takes a hefty commission from every tutoring session. The Preply commission policy clearly says they will:
The commission rate of 33% drops gradually. For instance, after 20 hours of teaching, you’ll be paying 28% in commissions. This drop continues, but the rate of drop gets slower. Eventually, when you clock 400 hours, your commission reaches 18%, which is the lowest commission rate.
If you are planning to ever grow as a tutor or build a proper tutoring business, this is very important for you: Preply owns the students, you don’t.
The dependency of a marketplace is very real - no matter how long you have been tutoring, students have come to you through Preply. They recognize Preply, not you. Hence, you won’t be able to build an audience in Preply that you can truly call your own.
However many students you teach and whatever ratings you win, Preply doesn’t allow you to build your own brand. That’s quite understandable from their point of view, because they’re only protecting themselves.
Preply doesn’t offer any white-labeling or branded website either, so every resource you use on the Preply platform carries their label: libraries, sessions, material, … whatever.
As a result, the moment your students walk out of your session, they remember Preply, not you.
A Preply review must mention what all tools Preply offers - and what ones are missing.
Preply is a marketplace, not a full-fledged LMS. The operational tools are basic to intermediate at best. You don’t get:
The detailed review of students’ performance like the attached screenshot is entirely missing on Preply.
As a platform, it works fine when you’re just one tutor. But if you plan to use Preply for your tutoring businesses or when you hire four or five tutors, the model doesn’t work. Here’s why:
Preply doesn’t have a strict criteria for accepting tutors - in many subjects, formal certifications are not mandatory. As a result, their marketplace is flooded with tutors offering very low prices, especially those living in geographies that have a low cost of living. The rates can go down to as low as $5 or $6, which creates an unnecessary friction for equivalent or better tutors based in the US or UK.
Because Preply is used by both students and tutors (and tutoring businesses), their experiences are shaped by their expectations. For instance, a student gets to choose from a range of teachers all of whom charge different fees. That gives them the freedom of selecting per their budget, which evidently is great for them.
Here’s how their experiences spread over different user profiles:
Anita, who taught German and Swiss German on Preply, feels the onboarding was smooth and frictionless, with no interview or distinction between certified teachers and community tutors. She found the setup process simple and self-explanatory.
She also found the subscription model particularly helpful. In her video review of Preply for tutors, she says, “Once a student subscribes to you… you don't have to remind them to book another lesson or to pay for a package.” This brings a certain predictability of income.
Against that, Rachel Roberts says Preply taking away 100% commission on every single trial lesson isn’t justified. In her Preply review, she argues that if a student has paid for a session, it isn’t really a trial lesson. And besides, a trial lesson lets you, as a tutor, evaluate the student as well. So every time you reject a student after the trial lesson, you end up giving away lots of free sessions.
Here’s how we will summarize a few other reviews.
Positives:
Negative:
Preply isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketplace. For some tutors it works way better than it works for others.
Based on different customer reviews of Preply, here’s where Preply seems to be a good choice:
While Preply might be a good fit for beginners or part-timers, the experience changes significantly when you begin growing as a tutor or you are looking to scale your tutoring business.
Different Preply reviews tell us the experience can become increasingly mixed or even negative under conditions like the below:
Preply is designed primarily as a marketplace that helps individual tutors connect with students. That model works well for freelancers who want a steady flow of learners without investing in marketing or building their own online presence.
If you're also considering business management platforms for tutoring organizations, our comparison of TutorCruncher Alternatives can help you understand how different solutions approach branding, operations, and scalability.
However, the needs of tutoring companies, coaching centers, test prep businesses, language academies, and schools are fundamentally different. As these organizations grow, they require greater control over their brand, operations, student experience, and long-term business growth.
EdisonOS is built specifically for these organizations. Instead of operating within a third-party marketplace, tutoring businesses can launch a fully white-label platform under their own brand, complete with their own website and student portal. This allows them to build direct relationships with students, own their customer data, and develop a recognizable brand without relying on a marketplace for visibility.
Operationally, EdisonOS offers tools that go beyond one-on-one lesson scheduling. Businesses can manage multiple tutors, organize students into batches, conduct live classes, deliver structured courses, create custom assessments and practice tests, and monitor learner performance through detailed analytics. Built-in CRM capabilities, payment management, and student management tools also help streamline administrative work as the organization grows.
Perhaps the biggest difference is ownership. With EdisonOS, tutoring businesses own their marketing, branding, and student relationships, giving them the flexibility to scale on their own terms rather than depending on a marketplace's policies or discovery algorithms.
For organizations focused on building a long-term education business rather than simply finding students, tutoring and growth capabilities become increasingly important. The table below summarizes how EdisonOS and Preply compare across the features that matter most to growing tutoring businesses.
When it comes to supporting individual tutors, part-timers, or freelancers, Preply works well. They are a marketplace where students set their own budget and discover tutors whose fees align with that budget.
Preply lets you, the tutor, set the fees and then collects the fees, deducts its commission from those fees and pays you the rest. It also takes care of the advertising and promotions - though it’s important to remember that Preply promotes itself as a platform, not you as a tutor. It is a great choice for individual tutors but it is not designed for tutoring businesses.
EdisonOS, on the other hand, is designed precisely for tutoring businesses. from small teams to large-sized tutoring companies with dozens of tutors. If you're still evaluating different tutoring and test-prep platforms, our guide to UWorld Alternatives compares other popular options that tutoring businesses often consider before making a long-term decision.
EdisonOS has everything your tutoring business needs: student CRM, reminders and fees collection solutions and integrations, white-label website building, time-table and scheduling, customized tests, and more.
If you’re looking for a one-tutor solution with simple, basic features Preply can meet your needs. When your requirements are modest and you do not have any growth plans, choosing Preply could make sense.
On the other hand, if you wish to spend less time in admin as you grow, EdisonOS wins by a wide margin. With EdisonOS it’s easy to scale, because that’s what EdisonOS is built for. For a tutoring professional or a tutoring business looking for a 360-degree solution for reminders, payments, scheduling, managing multiple tutors, and tests, EdisonOS becomes the ideal choice.
Even if you are currently on Preply, your requirements will soon outgrow what Preply can offer you. Which is why today is the right time to begin exploring EdisonOs in order to see if it will meet everything you need now - and in the future. You’ll soon realize EdisonOS is your long-term solution.
Preply is a good option for individual tutors and part-timers. For anyone who wants to try out online tutoring before getting into it full-time, Preply is definitely a great fit. As long as you’re not growing into a multi-tutor business, Preply is worth considering.
No, Preply is best suited for individual tutors and freelancers. It is a marketplace and it is not designed to handle the complexities of scheduling multiple tutors, time-table setting, or even branding of the tutoring business.
Generally Preply works best for individuals who do not have too many complexities in their operations or student management. Coaching centers trying to use Preply to manage students will likely find they’ll need additional tools to manage students. Trying to stitch different tools eventually makes admin activities siloed and slow.
The absence of features that can efficiently support growth and drive scaling of your tutoring business is generally considered the biggest limitation of Preply. Additional Preply limitations cited include the near absence of branding and website-building activities.
Preply can be good for individuals, but as your tutoring business scales you swiftly outgrow Preply. EdisonOS is designed to help tutoring businesses stay on top of their admin activities so that they spend less time in admin and more time in growth-focused activities. Scheduling, automation, and student management, in addition to customized tests, prompt tutoring businesses to switch from Preply to EdisonOS.
One of the key reasons why EdisonOS is better than Preply for tutoring businesses is that with EdisonOS, you own your audience, unlike Preply. Being a marketplace, Preply is what students recognize. Because tutoring business branding is not available with Preply, tutoring businesses cannot use Preply to grow. EdisonOS, on the other hand, offers whitelabelling, branding, and website building - all of which make it a superior choice over Preply.
No, Preply doesn’t offer any whitelabelling. As a tutor or a small tutoring business, your brand isn’t promoted - Preply focuses only on promoting their platform in general.
EdisonOS wins over alternatives, including Preply. EdisonOS exists precisely to solve the problems of student scheduling along with time-table and batch management across multiple tutors.
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