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What's a good Pencil Spaces alternative for online tutors?

A good Pencil Spaces alternative depends on why you're leaving. If your lessons run on equation editors, graphing or the apps built into your Pencil Spaces classroom, those tools are a big part of what you'd be giving up, so test any replacement against your hardest lesson before you move a single family. If you mostly teach younger children, ESL or reading, or you'd rather pay one flat monthly price than pay by the session hour, look for a browser-based classroom with a shared whiteboard, a cobrowser your students can click and type in, something that brings young learners back each week, 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 flat monthly plans.

Pencil Spaces describes itself as a classroom for tutoring. Its pricing page has hourly plans for tutors and an Enterprise plan for teams running thousands of session hours a month, and the logos on its homepage run from tutoring companies to literacy nonprofits and universities. So "Pencil Spaces 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 tutor for a school, a university or a volunteer program that runs its sessions on Pencil Spaces, the classroom is their call, not yours. If you're a student looking for your Space, ask your tutor for the link. 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 know the bill before the month starts. Pencil Spaces' pricing page charges its paid plans by the session hour, with a monthly minimum. That suits some tutors, because a quiet month costs less. Others would rather pay the same amount every month, including the weeks before exams when their hours double.
  • Your students are young. With a six-year-old, the lesson has to hold their attention on its own: something to move on the board, something to earn, and a reason to look forward to next week.
  • You want the office next to the classroom. Booking, invoices and notes to parents, without a separate login for each.
  • You're going independent. You tutored for a company or a program that ran its sessions on Pencil Spaces. Now you're building your own practice, and you need a classroom of your own.

When staying on Pencil Spaces makes sense

We'd rather you stay on the right tool than move to the wrong one. Pencil Spaces' own site lists equation editors, graphing tools and built-in apps such as Desmos inside its classroom. If your week is mostly algebra, calculus or physics with older students, and those tools carry your lessons, 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 and no full equation editor.

Two more cases. If you tutor for schools or districts and your contracts ask for named security and privacy certifications, Pencil Spaces lists several on its site, so ask any alternative what it can show you in writing before you plan a move. And if your scheduling system or LMS already creates your Pencil Spaces rooms through an integration, moving means rebuilding that connection, so count that work in the cost of switching.

What to check in any Pencil Spaces alternative

  1. Your real monthly bill. Take last month: how many hours you taught and how many students were in each lesson. Price that month on every plan you're considering, ours included, then price your busiest month the same way. Check what each plan counts: hours per session, hours per student, or nothing at all because it's a flat monthly fee. The same month can cost very different amounts depending on the answer.
  2. Your hardest lesson. The one with the most equations, the busiest board or 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. The websites and apps you open in lessons. List every site and app you used in lessons last week. For each one, check how it opens in the new classroom (built in, in a shared browser, or in a tab the student opens on their own) and whether the student can click and type in it or only watch you. Stick to sites your own plan or teacher license covers.
  4. 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 device your students actually use, which is often a parent's tablet or an older laptop rather than your own computer.
  5. What brings young students back. Rewards that carry over from one week to the next, 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 boards and materials. Before your plan changes, 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, and rebuild the five lessons you teach most first.
  7. Everything outside the lesson. Booking, attendance, recordings, lesson notes for parents and invoices. 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. Pick your date. Plan the move around your next billing date, so you're not paying for two classrooms for long.
  2. Rebuild the lessons you teach most, first. A handful that work properly are worth more than a whole library moved halfway.
  3. Run one real lesson with your most patient family. Their device, their usual time. Note every question they ask, because the answers become 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 paying is changing too, say so in the same message.
  5. Move families over a few weeks. Keep your 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, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.

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.
Websites in the lesson A 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. Free has a time-limited cobrowser; Pro removes the limit.
Young learners 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.
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.
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 a time, and the booked lesson opens your classroom. Pro. Platinum adds booking-policy controls and 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 with older students there's no graphing canvas or full equation editor, as above. Koala is built for 1-on-1 and small groups, not large classes or lectures. The websites you teach from open in the cobrowser, signed in with your own account on each site. We don't have ready-made integrations with LMS or tutoring management tools, 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 with 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 puts the main tutoring whiteboards 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 Pencil Spaces and want to know whether Koala fits the way you teach, write to us at koala@teachwithkoala.com.

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