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What's a good Lessonspace alternative for online tutors?

A good Lessonspace alternative depends on why you're moving. If most of your lessons lean on an equation editor, live graphing or a code editor with older students, those subject tools are a big part of what Lessonspace offers, and any replacement has to pass your hardest lesson before you move a single family. If you teach younger children, ESL or reading, or you'd rather your bill didn't depend on how many hours you teach, look for a browser-based classroom with a shared whiteboard, a cobrowser your students can click and type in, something that keeps young learners engaged, and booking and invoicing in the same place. Koala Go is one option: a virtual classroom for 1-on-1 and small-group lessons with a whiteboard, a cobrowser and a 3D Playground, on monthly plans that don't change with your hours.

Lessonspace is a browser-based virtual classroom for online tutoring. Its pricing page has plans for everyone from part-time individual tutors to large tutoring agencies, so "Lessonspace alternative" means different things to different people. This page is for two of them: independent tutors who find their own students and bill families directly, and tutoring companies that run lessons for their own students. If you teach on Lessonspace because a tutoring company or a tutoring marketplace runs its lessons there, the classroom is their call, not yours. If you're a student looking for your lesson link, ask your tutor. We build Koala Go, so the page ends with where it fits and where it doesn't. Everything before that is the checklist we'd use whichever classroom you move to.

Why tutors start looking

Tutors who change classrooms usually have one of these in mind:

  • You'd rather your bill didn't move with your hours. On a plan that includes a set number of lesson hours and charges for the hours beyond them, a busy month costs more than a quiet one. Some tutors like that, because a quiet month costs less too. Others would rather know the number before the month starts.
  • Your students are young. A whiteboard-first classroom suits a teenager working through problems. A six-year-old needs the lesson itself to hold their attention: something to move on the board, something to earn, and something to look forward to at the end.
  • You want the office in one place. The classroom in one tab, a booking tool in another, invoices in a third, and parent updates by email. Every extra login is another subscription and another thing to keep in step.
  • You're going independent. You taught for a company that ran its lessons on Lessonspace, you're building your own practice now, and you need a classroom of your own.

When staying on Lessonspace makes sense

We'd rather you stay on the right tool than move to the wrong one. Lessonspace's own site lists maths, science, language and coding tools built into the classroom. If your week is mostly algebra, calculus, physics or programming with older students, and you rely on an equation editor, live graphing or a shared code editor, test any alternative against your hardest lesson before you go further. Ours won't pass that test: Koala Go has math manipulatives for younger students, but no graphing canvas, no full equation editor and no code editor.

The same goes for a tutoring company whose booking system already creates a Lessonspace room for every lesson through a built-in integration. If that works well, moving means rebuilding the connection between the two, so count that work in the cost of switching.

What to check in any Lessonspace alternative

  1. How the bill is worked out. Take last month: how many hours you taught, how many students were in each lesson, and how long you spent in shared tools like a cobrowser. Price that month on every plan you're considering, ours included, then price your busiest month the same way. Whether a plan charges per hour, per student or a flat monthly fee matters more than the headline price.
  2. Your hardest lesson. Pick the lesson that leans hardest on your current classroom: the most equations, the busiest whiteboard, the most websites. Rebuild it in the new classroom and teach it. If it doesn't hold up, nothing else on this list matters.
  3. How a student gets in. Ask what a new family has to do before lesson one: install something, make an account, or just open a link. Then try it on the kind of device your students actually use, which is often a parent's tablet or an older laptop rather than your own computer.
  4. The cobrowser, if you teach from websites. Check that students can click and type in the shared page, not just watch it, and how you hand control to one student and take it back. Check whether it's included on the plan you'd buy or limited by time.
  5. What keeps young students engaged. Rewards they earn, things they can move on the board, a game at the end. If you teach under-10s, try these in a real lesson rather than in a demo.
  6. Your materials. Before your current plan ends, check what you can take with you, and keep your original slides, PDFs and worksheets somewhere you control. Then check which file types the new classroom opens. Rebuild the five lessons you teach most first, and the rest as they come up.
  7. Everything outside the lesson. List what you do between lessons: booking, invoices, recordings, notes to parents, and any tool that creates your lesson links for you. For each one, check whether the new classroom does it, or which app will.
  8. Who answers when it breaks. Ask how support works and when it's available, and try it once during your test week.

How to switch without losing a family

  1. Find your renewal date. Plan the move around it, so you're not paying for two classrooms for long.
  2. Rebuild your most-used lessons first. Five lessons that work beat fifty half-moved ones.
  3. Teach one real lesson with your most patient family. On their device, at their usual time. Write down everything you had to explain, because that's what goes in your message to everyone else.
  4. Send each family one short message. The new link, one sentence on how to join, and the date it starts. If booking or invoicing is moving too, say so in the same message.
  5. Move families over a few weeks, not in one night. Keep the old classroom until the last family has had a good lesson in the new one.

Where Koala Go fits

Koala Go is the browser-based virtual classroom we build for online tutors who teach 1-on-1 and small groups. A lot of them teach young learners, ESL, reading, or students with learning differences like dyslexia. Koala Free costs nothing, Koala Pro is $25.99/month ($21.99/month billed annually), and Koala Platinum is $49.99/month ($39.99/month billed annually). Those are flat monthly prices: they stay the same whether you teach ten hours a month or eighty.

Job In Koala Go Plan
Getting in Students open your link, type their name and wait in your waiting room. No account, nothing to install, and your link stays the same every week. Every plan. Free covers up to 4 students per session.
Whiteboard A shared whiteboard for slides, writing and drawing. Lessons are saved as activities, so next week opens where you stopped. Free keeps up to 3 activities; Pro and Platinum keep as many as you like.
Math tools Number rods, preset number lines, shapes, fraction bars and circles, a number roller and math symbols, for primary and middle-school math. Not for graphing or advanced algebra. Number rods, number lines, basic shapes and a symbols set on Pro; fraction bars and circles, the number roller, the full shape set and advanced symbols on Platinum.
Cobrowser A shared live browser where you and your students use the same webpage, each with your own cursor. You decide, student by student, who can click and type. More on how a cobrowser differs from screen sharing. Free has a time-limited cobrowser; Pro removes the limit.
Playground and rewards A 3D Playground where students walk an avatar around, and gems you award during the lesson that students spend on items for their space. The Playground is on every plan. Pro includes 300 gems a month to award; Platinum includes 2,000.
Your materials JPEG and PNG images, plus PDF, PowerPoint and Word files on the paid plans. Images on Free; documents on Pro and Platinum.
Booking Our scheduling portal. You set weekly availability, families book in their own timezone, and the booked lesson opens your classroom. Pro. Platinum adds booking-policy controls and two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync.
Invoicing Create an invoice and the parent pays online. You invoice in your own currency and the parent can pay in theirs through the payment platform. Every plan. Our fee is 4.5% per invoice on Free, 3.5% on Pro and 0% on Platinum, on top of the payment platform's own fees.
Recordings and parent updates Record to your own computer, or record to the cloud and get an AI-drafted lesson report you review, then download as a PDF or email to the parent. Pro records locally; Platinum adds cloud recordings and the lesson reports.

Some honest limits. For advanced STEM there's no graphing canvas, full equation editor or code editor, as above. Koala is built for 1-on-1 and small groups, not large classes or lectures. We don't connect to tutoring management tools like TutorBird, Teachworks or TutorCruncher, so if one of those creates your lesson links today, plan for that to change. There's no homework or test system, and we don't send lesson reminders, so those jobs stay in whatever you already use with families. Koala works on an iPad, but it's rougher there than on a laptop. And if your students are in mainland China, test there before anything else: connectivity into China is something we keep working on, not something we've solved.

If you're mainly comparing whiteboards rather than whole classrooms, our online whiteboard roundup sets Lessonspace, BitPaper, Ziteboard and others side by side.

If you run a tutoring company

Koala for Business is the same classroom for a company with many tutors: your logo on your own domain (or on a Koala subdomain we set up for you), every Koala Pro teaching feature turned on for every tutor, and a business dashboard for your team. Admins can copy lesson activities from one tutor's library to others', which helps when a new tutor starts on your curriculum. Unlike our tutor plans, Koala for Business is priced by usage: $1.10 per student per active hour, with a $110 monthly minimum, and time a tutor spends in the classroom alone isn't billed. The details are on our page for tutoring companies.

If your booking system creates your lesson rooms today, you can keep it and connect it through our API: your system creates each lesson in Koala and gets back a teacher link and a student link, and students still don't need an account. The standard API comes with the plan; custom development on our side is quoted separately, so if nobody on your team can build the connection, ask us for a quote before you plan around it. The API workflow is on online tutoring platform APIs, and how Koala for Business handles scheduling, student records and parent bookings is on tutoring business management software.

You can try Koala Go without installing anything at classroom.teachwithkoala.com and teach a real lesson on Koala Free. If you're weighing a move from Lessonspace and want to know whether Koala fits the way you teach, write to us at koala@teachwithkoala.com.

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