Best AI Tools for Education: Students, Teachers, Costs

Education is two different problems wearing one name. A student wants to understand material and produce work; a teacher wants to produce material for thirty people and check it. Which tools are appropriate for the students is a policy question before it is a product question. This page is about the tooling split; our teachers and students audience pages cover the wider stacks for each role.

For students, the free tiers are not a compromise: ChatGPT and Gemini both have real free tiers, and NotebookLM, which works only against documents you supply, is the one that maps onto a course reading list. It is free, with the features beyond the free allowance included in Google AI Pro at $19.99/mo as part of Google One — so the paid upgrade is worth it only if the free allowance is genuinely the constraint. For teachers, the reusable-output problem is different: Gamma turns an outline into a deck and starts free, with Plus at $12/mo, which matters when you rebuild the same lesson for three classes.

The constraint that overrides price: student data and minors. These tools are consumer products by default, and their retention and training terms are not written for a classroom. Some regions block Gemini entirely, and Google AI Pro availability differs between institutions, so the honest first step is asking what your school already has a contract for rather than trialling tools in class. Also worth naming: all four will produce confident, wrong material, so anything a student submits and anything a teacher hands out needs a human read.