Khanmigo

Overview

Khanmigo is an AI tutor and teaching assistant from Khan Academy, the education nonprofit. It is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and built around a Socratic style: instead of giving a learner the answer, it asks questions and offers hints to guide them to the solution. It serves three audiences (learners, parents, and teachers) and is tied to Khan Academy's library of exercises, videos, and articles.

What it does

For learners, Khanmigo tutors across math, science, coding, history, and the humanities, and acts as a writing and debate coach giving real-time feedback, a test-prep helper, and a college and career coach. It gives feedback as students practice coding in JavaScript, HTML, Python, and SQL. It supports voice through speech-to-text and text-to-speech. All of this is assistant-grade: it responds and coaches when asked and does not act on its own.

For teachers, Khanmigo is a copilot for prep work. It drafts standards-aligned, differentiated lesson plans, quiz questions and problem sets with answer keys, learning objectives, rubrics, and exit tickets, and it writes family emails, newsletters, and class communications. It also summarizes student work and progress. The teacher reviews and uses each artifact, so these features are copilot-grade rather than autonomous.

Autonomy note

Treat Khanmigo as an assistant. The learner-facing tutor responds when asked and deliberately withholds the answer to keep the learner in the driver's seat, and the teacher tools generate drafts a human reviews and edits. Nothing runs multi-step or takes actions without a person, so it is not a supervised or autonomous agent.

Integrations & setup

Khanmigo runs as a web product at khanmigo.ai and inside Khan Academy, where it provides tutoring on every exercise, video, and article. For districts it supports single sign-on via Clever and ClassLink and adds district-wide access, usage analytics, and a dedicated customer success manager. It is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4.

Pricing

Freemium. It is free for teachers (supported by a partnership with Microsoft) in participating countries. Learners and parents pay $4/month or $44/year, and one parent subscription can add up to 10 child accounts at no extra charge. Districts and schools are custom-priced and quote-based. Paid plans require US billing as of the last review, and prices exclude sales tax. Check the official pricing page for current figures.

Best for / not for

Best for students who want a patient tutor that builds understanding instead of doing the work for them, parents who want affordable homework support, and teachers who want to cut lesson-prep time with AI-drafted materials. Less suited to anyone who wants a hands-off autonomous agent, or to learners outside the US who hit billing restrictions, or to use cases outside education where a general-purpose assistant fits better.

Traction

Khan Academy reports its tools are used by millions of teachers and trusted by a very large global base of learners, educators, and parents (figures are vendor-reported). Free teacher access spans more than 40 countries in English.

Alternatives

General-purpose assistants like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude can tutor and draft lesson materials, but they answer directly rather than coaching Socratically and are not tied to a vetted education content library the way Khanmigo is.