Khanmigo review for adults: a $4 tutor built for school

I have not used Khanmigo. I tried to sign up on October 3, 2026 and stopped at the checkout, because a learner gets no free access. This review comes from Khan Academy's own pages and from people who tested Khanmigo and put a name or a handle on what they wrote. I build Understand, a voice tutor for adults, so weigh my conclusions accordingly.

Khanmigo in brief

Khanmigo is the AI tutor inside Khan Academy, which announced it on March 14, 2023, built on GPT-4. A chat window opens beside a Khan Academy video, article or exercise, and Sal Khan writes that it "can see the problem a student is working on". The learners page says: "Unlike other AI tools such as ChatGPT, Khanmigo doesn't just give answers."

Khanmigo price and sign-up rules

The price is $4 a month or $44 a year, before sales tax. My checkout showed $4.36 with New York tax. Teachers get a separate set of tools free, and nothing is free for a learner. My logged-in Khan Academy dashboard showed a "Get Khanmigo" offer with the first 30 days free, and it asked for a card.

MaryAnne Kochenderfer, a parent who reviewed it in November 2023, got access through a recurring donation of $10 a month or $99 a year. By January 2024 Khan Academy's blog said it had "recently dropped the price to $4/month or $44/year".

The learners page says "you must make a monthly or annual payment, be 18 years or older, live in the United States, and have a billing address in the U.S." Anyone under 18 gets in through a parent's account, which can add up to ten children, or through a school district that has bought it. The page I read was published on September 28, 2026, so the US-only rule is current.

Tutoring and activities

Khan Academy promises "personalized tutoring on every exercise, video, and article on Khan Academy", for learners "in elementary school through college". The subjects it names are math, science, coding, history and the humanities. It reviews code in JavaScript, HTML, Python and SQL. The plan also covers essay feedback and debates, plus coaching on college admissions and careers.

From Khan Academy's screenshots, my impression is of a chat window beside a list of activities: "Writing with the AI", "Tutor me", "Coach my academic and career growth", "Talking to historical characters", "Debate". The starter prompts include "Help me pick a major" and "Does it matter where I go to college?" I read those prompts as written for a seventeen-year-old.

A help article, last updated two years ago, lists where Khanmigo is absent. It does not appear on quizzes, unit tests, course challenges or mastery challenges. It is also "not programmed to offer assistance with MCAT, LSAT and Praxis prep". All three are exams that adults take.

Khanmigo is a text chat. The parents page says it "has both text to speech and speech to text capabilities": you dictate, and it "will also read out its responses to you". I found no page describing a spoken conversation you can interrupt.

Reports from testers

Kochenderfer's tenth-grade son used it for math, and she called it "a game changer" because he no longer waited for a parent to get unstuck. He told her it made mistakes, and she judged them "usually easy to spot".

Natasha Singer of the New York Times visited First Avenue Elementary in Newark in June 2023. A third-grade class asked Khanmigo what fraction of the letters in MATHEMATICIAN are consonants, and it told them: seven out of thirteen. Singer wrote that its responses "sometimes seemed less like suggestions and more like direct answers".

Math errors

Matt Barnum tested Khanmigo for the Wall Street Journal in February 2024. He reported that it "frequently made basic arithmetic errors", including 343 minus 17. On a right triangle with a hypotenuse of 27 and a side of 17, he offered 430 for the difference of the squares. The answer is 440, and Khanmigo replied "Excellent!" On a triangle it had invented itself, he correctly gave 144 for 15 squared minus 9 squared, and it told him to "take another look at the subtraction".

Benjamin Riley asked it to help simplify an equation about a pen and a crayon for an essay in Education Next. The 74 summarised the exchange in July 2024: Khanmigo ended up asking him to rethink whether 2 + 2.5 equals 4.5. rahimnathwani, who bought a year's subscription for his child, wrote that it "told me my answer (to a problem it had given me) was wrong, even though I was right".

Khan Academy responded in May 2024. Khanmigo "now uses a calculator to solve numerical problems instead of using AI's predictive capabilities". A May 2026 post describes a "math agent" that verifies calculations before each reply. Every test with a name on it that I found predates that post, so I cannot tell you the current error rate.

Teaching complaints

Dan Meyer, a former math teacher who works at Amplify, showed in February 2024 that Khanmigo ignored the student's own answer. He entered a line with the right intercept and an inverted slope, and it asked if he knew slope-intercept form. Two months later he found that Khan Academy had started passing the student's work to the model, "only sometimes and only sometimes accurately".

light_hue_1, who has taught math up to graduate level, tried it in 2024: "It gets stuck explaining the same things in the same ways but with different words over and over again."

A student who insists on the answer

When Barnum asked for the solution, Khanmigo offered replies such as "I'm here to help you learn, not just give answers!" Kristen Musall, a geometry teacher at Hobart High School in Indiana, told Barnum in April 2026 that her students found it frustrating because it sometimes made mistakes and also would not give the answer away. She no longer uses it. Her superintendent, Peggy Buffington, counts the same refusal as the benefit: students "can get help with their homework and it won't give them the answer".

The refusal sometimes failed. Khan Academy's May 2026 post reports that one change to the math agent "reduced giving away the answer by 50%".

The evidence

Philip Oreopoulos of the University of Toronto and Nina Low ran a randomized trial in 18 middle schools in Hamilton County, Tennessee, over two school years. Students in remedial math sessions used Khan Academy with Khanmigo. Their scores rose by 1.3 national percentile ranks per term, about 0.06 to 0.08 standard deviations over a school year. The authors write that the gains "resemble those from Khan Academy practice without AI assistance".

The authors point to the usage logs. Of the students, 96 percent tried Khanmigo at least once. The median student messaged it on a third of the days they practiced, and in 17 percent of the sessions in which they made a mistake. Only 14.5 percent of messages contained a mathematical question or a step of reasoning. The paper paraphrases others: "whats the answer", and "just give me it I already got it wrong so theres no point doing it again".

Sal Khan had already conceded this. "For a lot of students, it was a non-event," he told Barnum in April 2026. "They just didn't use it much."

Khan Academy's own evidence is about its exercises. Its Newark study measured practice, with no tutor in the analysis. Its Khanmigo tests measure whether a student gets the next problem right, which rose 6.1 percent after the tutor was given the student's practice history and unmastered prerequisites. Kristen DiCerbo, the chief learning officer, told K-12 Dive in August 2025 that Khan Academy had not yet run a randomized trial of Khanmigo itself.

The Common Sense Media institute rates Khanmigo "Low risk" in an assessment last updated in August 2024. It warns that Khanmigo sits inside a library people trust, which makes them less likely "to realize they should be checking Khanmigo's responses".

None of this was measured on adults. The students were middle schoolers assigned to remedial sessions. Oreopoulos told Barnum: "If a keen, engaged student wants to use the technology as a good tutor, it's ready to go." An adult paying $4 by choice is closer to that student.

Changes in 2025 and 2026

Khan Academy announced a rebuilt product for school districts in October 2025, with Khanmigo "embedded directly into the learning platform". A spokesperson told Chalkbeat that "students were not seeking out Khanmigo's help as much as we had hoped."

Google became a partner in January 2026, and Gemini models now power Writing Coach. In August, Google said Khanmigo generates interactive diagrams for math and science and notices when a student drags a vertex. That post addresses districts, and I could not confirm that the $4 plan has the diagrams.

The May 2026 post says Khanmigo now receives your recent attempts on Khan Academy, your skill levels, the prerequisites you have not mastered, and your chats on the same skill from the previous 24 hours.

The price and the sign-up rules for learners did not change.

The fit for a US student and for an adult

For a student in a US school, Khanmigo is the obvious choice. It costs $4, it follows the courses the school assigns, it refuses to do the homework, and a parent can read the chat history.

For an adult the fit is narrow. The library covers school subjects and early college, and Khanmigo stays out of the MCAT and LSAT material. Its memory, as documented, is your exercise history on Khan Academy. I found no page describing a record of what you understood about a book or a paper that Khan Academy does not teach.

barrenko, an adult with two million Khan Academy points who is using it to learn physics, wrote in April 2026 that he has never opened Khanmigo. He takes his questions to a general chatbot, and adds that typing math questions "is fatiguing".

Khanmigo is worth $4 to an adult who is relearning algebra or statistics on Khan Academy anyway. A tutor that sees the exercise is cheap at that price, and I would try the 30 days.

Khanmigo alternatives for adults

The other rows come from my earlier posts, where each price is sourced.

Khanmigo vs ChatGPT

ChatGPT's Study Mode also asks before it tells. It is free and takes any subject. Khanmigo's advantage is the course, with exercises in order and a tutor that sees the one you are on. I compare the general assistants in the best AI tutors in 2026.

Understand by comparison

Understand is a voice call with a tutor, on any subject, and you can interrupt it mid-sentence. It reads a saved article or a text PDF aloud in full and stops when you ask a question. It builds a knowledge graph from what you explain back in your own words, and you can read and correct that graph.

Understand has no course library, no exercises, no tools for teachers or parents and no Android app. It is free for now, and voice calls cost money to run, so it will not stay free. Khanmigo cost $4 in January 2024 and costs $4 today. Nobody has run a trial of Understand, and Khanmigo has one.

Choosing

A US student with Khan Academy homework should get Khanmigo, and so should an adult working through a Khan Academy course who lives in the United States.

An adult who wants skill at math should pay for Math Academy. One with a single question tonight can use ChatGPT Study Mode for free.

I build Understand for the adult who would rather talk than type and wants the tutor to know next month what they understood this month.