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Preply's whiteboard: when it's enough, and what you can do when it isn't

Preply's in-classroom whiteboard works for a lot of lessons — upload a document or image, mark it up live with your student, chat alongside — and for straightforward adult 1-on-1s it is often enough. The limits worth knowing before you plan around it: Preply saves your boards by lesson for you, but your student cannot access the whiteboard after the lesson; the whiteboard is desktop-only — not available on the Preply mobile app; and the previous generation of Preply Whiteboard was permanently removed on January 30, 2026, so anything you stored on it is gone if you didn't export in time. If you are running up against one of those limits — kid students who are on iPad half the time, pedagogy that needs the student to actively drag things rather than watch you move them, or lessons where you want the student to revisit the material between sessions — you have three practical options that don't require you to leave Preply. We walk through each honestly, then describe where Koala Go fits for a tutor eventually building a second channel of their own.

What Preply's Whiteboard actually is

Preply's own help center describes the Preply Whiteboard as a tool inside the Preply Classroom "that enhances the learning experience by allowing tutors and students to collaboratively engage with lesson materials in real-time." In practice that means a shared canvas you (as the tutor) open from the classroom's Tools menu during a lesson, where you work through lesson materials with your student while the video call runs alongside it. Boards save automatically and are organised by the date and time of the lesson, so you can reopen a past lesson's board to review it or carry on where you left off. You can upload files to the board — images (jpg, png, gif, webp), videos (mp4, mpeg, mov, webm), audio (mp3, wav), documents (doc, docx, pdf), and presentations (ppt, pptx) — up to a 128 MB per-file cap. There is also a separate in-classroom tool called Preply Canvas, "a built-in tool in the Preply Classroom that helps tutors plan and organize lessons" with pages, headings, lists and live notes — a lesson-planning surface rather than a drawing surface. The two sit side by side; the Whiteboard is for live visual work, the Canvas is for structured notes.

Preply's own tutor-features guide calls the Whiteboard "a dynamic, interactive tool within the Preply Classroom that enhances the learning experience by allowing tutors and students to collaboratively engage with lesson materials in real time." Its practical shape is roughly what you would expect of a built-in classroom whiteboard built for 1-on-1 conversation lessons: it exists so the student is not just watching your face, it accepts the files you already have, and it keeps the lesson in one browser tab.

Where the Preply Whiteboard shows its limits

Three specifics, each grounded in Preply's own documentation, and each the kind of thing that makes a tutor type "preply whiteboard" into Google in the first place:

  • Students cannot access the whiteboard after the lesson. From Preply's student guide: "Please note, students cannot access the whiteboard after the lesson." If part of your pedagogy is "the student revisits what we built in the lesson between sessions" — a vocabulary web you co-built, a sentence diagram, a reading passage you annotated — that revision loop lives outside the Preply Whiteboard. Your own copy is kept — Preply files each board under its lesson — but the student's access ends when the lesson does. Sending the key page to the student as a file afterwards works; it is still a workaround.
  • The Whiteboard is desktop-only; it does not work in the Preply mobile app. Preply's student guide is explicit: "Both learners and tutors must use a desktop version of Preply to access the whiteboard (it is not available on the mobile app)." Perfectly fine for an adult learner at a laptop. Not fine for a kid student whose parent sometimes puts them on an iPad because that's what's lying around, or for an adult who joins from their phone at the last minute. If that fraction of your lessons is non-trivial, the whiteboard is sometimes unavailable to the student on their side.
  • The old Whiteboard was permanently removed on January 30, 2026. Preply's own help page states: "The old Preply Whiteboard was permanently removed after January 30, 2026." For anything not exported before then, "Whiteboard pages created in the old whiteboard are no longer accessible" and "Files and annotations stored there cannot be recovered." Content made in the current whiteboard is unaffected. This is a one-time event, not a recurring risk, but it is worth internalising as a reminder: content inside a platform you don't own has the shelf life the platform assigns it. Any whiteboard material you plan to re-use across students for years is safer in a tool whose storage you control.

None of this makes Preply's Whiteboard bad. For a conversation lesson, a document markup, an explain-with-a-drawing moment, it's exactly the right scope. The limits bite in a narrower set of situations than the typing-of-the-search-query suggests — but they bite reliably when they do.

Option 1: Open a dedicated whiteboard in a second window alongside Preply

The cheapest fix: keep Preply for the video, chat, booking and payments; open a dedicated whiteboard tool in a second browser window, share the link with the student in Preply's chat, and run both. You are not leaving Preply; you are extending it. This is a well-trodden workflow among tutors on marketplaces generally — the Preply classroom runs on your main screen, the whiteboard runs on a second window (ideally a second monitor), and the student sees the whiteboard URL and opens it on their own device.

The honest tradeoffs:

  • Two tools, two logins, two sources of truth. Your student has to click a second link each lesson, remember the password or the room code if the tool uses one, and context-switch between Preply's video (where you are) and the whiteboard tab (where the work is). Younger students handle this worse than adults.
  • You still have Preply's audio and video. Which is a feature, not a bug — Preply handles the connection, you avoid a second video tool, and your student stays in the environment they know.
  • Your student can get back in. Most dedicated whiteboard tools let you keep the board URL stable for a given student, so the student can revisit the shared canvas between sessions — the part Preply keeps on your side only.
  • Mobile is usually better. Most third-party whiteboard tools work on an iPad browser, which solves the Preply mobile-app limit for the student side at least.
  • Preply still owns the lesson. Commission still applies, confirmation still runs through Preply, the student still finds you through the marketplace. You are only replacing the whiteboard component of the lesson, not the business shape.

For a shortlist of dedicated online whiteboards worth considering alongside Preply — BitPaper, Ziteboard, Lessonspace, Miro, Microsoft Whiteboard — our online-whiteboard roundup covers them in depth, including the trade-offs for different lesson shapes. We won't restate the shortlist here. The angle to pick on is: does the tool give the student a persistent room they can revisit, does it work on an iPad browser, and does it support the specific interactions your pedagogy needs (drag-and-drop tokens, math notation, equation editor, structured phonics tools)?

Option 2: Keep Preply for marketplace students, start a parallel practice for your own

A second realistic shape, which many working marketplace tutors eventually land on: Preply stays as it is — your marketplace channel, where you keep taking new students the platform brings you, with their classroom and their whiteboard and their commission — and you build a separate channel of your own, with your own students, your own tools, your own rates (unencumbered by marketplace price pressure), and your own classroom. The two run in parallel.

Why this is often better than "leave Preply":

  • Preply is still finding you new students. That's the thing a marketplace does that a tutor-run practice cannot easily replicate. If you leave Preply entirely, you lose that pipeline — and the real cost of walking away is not the commission, it is the next-month gap in your calendar while you figure out how to find families on your own.
  • Preply's commission structure penalises churn, not loyalty. Preply's own help center lays this out: "The commission for every trial lesson with a new student is 100%. For all the subsequent lessons, the tutor is charged a percentage of the hourly rate (between 18% and 33%)." The rate drops as cumulative hours accumulate. If you have invested in getting to a lower tier, that investment keeps paying off on retained Preply students even while you build your own channel on the side.
  • Your parallel channel is where the better tools and the full rate go. No commission on your own students, your own choice of classroom platform (whiteboard included), your own branding, your own cadence. The marketing you do on this channel compounds over years rather than disappearing into the marketplace's search algorithm.
  • You respect Preply's rules. Preply's User Code of Conduct rules out tutoring Preply users "bypassing the Preply Platform" and taking payment from students directly. The sustainable way to do a parallel channel is to build it with new people — a website of your own, a referral network, parent groups in your city, your existing offline students — not by converting Preply introductions into off-platform relationships, which is both against the rules and (if your account is caught) a fast way to lose the marketplace channel entirely.

If this is the shape that fits you, the general sequencing — niche, pricing, intake, lesson structure, the business plumbing you have to put in place before the first paying off-platform student — is covered on how to start an online tutoring business and the specialist-case cross-link to how to start a reading tutoring business. Those pages are written for a tutor building from zero; adapt them to "parallel channel" by treating the Preply practice as your base income while you grow the second one.

Option 3: Move to a dedicated classroom platform (eventually, if the shape fits)

The third shape, usually a few years into a tutoring career rather than Day 1: your own-channel practice becomes big enough to carry you, and the marketplace channel is no longer worth the commission. At that point the full-stack decision is less about the whiteboard and more about everything the marketplace was doing for you — booking, payments, dispute handling, student acquisition — all of which now need to live somewhere else.

A dedicated classroom platform built for independent tutors handles the classroom part (the whiteboard, the video, the engagement layer, the recording). It does not solve the student-acquisition part — a classroom tool is not a marketplace, and the honest marketing read is that building your own pipeline takes months to years. The decision rule most working tutors we hear from land on: switch when your own-channel students are a majority of your income and your calendar is full enough that losing the marketplace's trickle wouldn't materially hurt you. Not before.

How Koala Go fits for a tutor building their own channel

We're Koala Go — a browser-based virtual classroom built specifically for independent online tutors. We're the "dedicated classroom platform" from Option 3 above, and we're also a reasonable choice as the Option 1 external whiteboard for a tutor who wants a tutoring-centric canvas rather than a generic drawing tool. Honest sketch of what we ship, grounded in our own code and roughly in the shape a Preply tutor comparing tools wants to see:

  • Shared whiteboard with drag-and-drop both sides can touch. Fabric.js canvas with Sticky-note objects, Stamp images, text, pen tool, and shape tools — both tutor and student can grab and move anything live. Group-select to move or resize layouts as one. The design intent is "the student does the dragging, not watches you drag."
  • Cobrowser — a live shared webpage, not a screen share. Opens a real website inside the classroom where you and the student are both on the same live page and either of you can point, click, and type. Reading A-Z, Oxford Owl, Khan Academy, Grammar.com, Figma — whatever your subject's web tools are, you both drive them together instead of you demonstrating with mouse-control-swapping. One of our tutors described it as "The cobrowser is unique and so much easier to use than a shared screen with remote control on Zoom." The free tier gives 10-minute sessions with a 20-minute cooldown; the full session comes with Koala Pro. More on this at what is a cobrowser.
  • PDF and PowerPoint upload (on Pro). Your existing lesson files become annotatable slides without reconstruction. Much like Preply's file upload; the annotated slides stay in your activity for the next lesson.
  • Math Tools suite on the paid tiers. Number rods (Cuisenaire-style), preset number lines (0-10, 0-20, 0-100, negative ranges, blank), basic shapes (square, rectangle, circle, equilateral triangle, lines and arrows, and a cube) and a math symbols set on Koala Pro; the full 2D and 3D shape set, fraction bars, fraction circles, a number roller, and an advanced symbols set on Koala Platinum. Covers primary- and middle-school math well. Honest limit: no full equation editor or live graphing canvas — for advanced STEM, a dedicated STEM whiteboard like Lessonspace goes deeper.
  • Playground, an in-browser 3D space for engagement. Students have an avatar they can walk around a voxel world, build with blocks, and spend earned gems in. Younger learners treat it as the reward for a hard-work lesson; many tutors use it as a mid-lesson movement break. One of several reinforcement layers; subject-agnostic.
  • Lesson recording. Local recording to your own machine on Koala Pro; cloud recordings (shareable per lesson) on Koala Platinum. The recording captures the shared canvas alongside the video, which is useful for a parent progress clip and for your own reflective practice. The recording explainer covers consent and sharing.
  • Built-in scheduling and worldwide invoicing. Parents book your availability (on Koala Pro and above), pay you in their local currency through the payment rail that works for them (card, PayPal, WeChat Pay in China), and you receive payouts to PayPal or Wise. Not a marketplace — we don't bring you students — but we do run the booking and billing surface once you have your own.
  • Student joins by link with no account. Everything runs in the browser; no download, no student login. One click and a nickname.

Honest limits a Preply tutor should know about, because they will matter the first time one of them does:

  • We don't bring you students. If you leave Preply entirely for Koala, the marketplace channel is gone — your calendar fills from your own effort, not ours. Most tutors reading this will want Option 2 (parallel channel) long before Option 3 (full switch).
  • iPad works but is rougher than desktop. If your student is often on an iPad, test one real lesson on their actual device before you commit.
  • No built-in CRM for lead pipelines or marketing automation. We're a classroom and billing surface; the "where are my inquiries coming from and how do I follow up" layer is a separate tool. If you need that, run a CRM alongside.
  • Mainland-China connectivity is served by our Hong Kong proxy but is a moving target. If a meaningful share of your students are in mainland China, that's a real limit worth knowing about up front.
  • No included curriculum. You bring your own program, your own lesson materials, your own flashcards. We are the delivery surface, not the content.

Pricing, consistent with our other pages: the free tier is a real classroom, not a trial — capped at 4 students per session, with the whiteboard, Gems, Playground, and short cobrowser sessions available. Koala Pro is $25.99/month monthly or $21.99/month billed annually and unlocks lesson scheduling, PDF and PowerPoint upload, full-length cobrowser sessions, local lesson recording, and the Pro-tier Math Tools. Koala Platinum adds cloud recordings, Scheduling Plus, auto-generated class notes, and the Platinum-tier Math Tools.

A short decision rule

  1. If Preply's Whiteboard is enough for most lessons and the limits above show up occasionally rather than constantly, stay with it. The simplest tool stack that works is almost always the right one — and the 128 MB file upload, in-lesson drawing, and tutor-chat shape covers a lot of conversation lessons cleanly.
  2. If your student needs to get back to the board between lessons or to work on an iPad, or you're anchoring a kid student who needs to drag objects, open a dedicated whiteboard in a second window and share the link in Preply chat (Option 1). See the online-whiteboard roundup for a shortlist.
  3. If your long-term plan is a tutoring business of your own, not a steady marketplace income, start the parallel channel now (Option 2) and keep Preply running on the side. Marketing on your own channel takes months to compound; starting it the day you decide to leave Preply is a year too late.
  4. If your own-channel students are already a majority of your calendar, that is when the full-switch decision (Option 3) stops being premature. A classroom like Koala Go — or any of the dedicated independent-tutor classroom platforms — becomes the daily tool; Preply becomes the historical reference you tell new tutors about.

If you want to talk any of this through with us — specifically about where Koala Go fits for your particular student mix, or whether the parallel-channel shape makes sense from where you are — write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about your current practice and we'll give you an honest read. We're a small team of techies from families of teachers; most of what we build, we build because an independent tutor asked us to.

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