Preply Alternative for Independent Tutors: A CRM for Students You Already Have
Looking for a Preply alternative? Student Portal is not a marketplace — it's the tutor CRM you use after Preply for scheduling, payments, and homework.
If you searched for "Preply alternative", you probably mean one of two very different things.
The first is "another marketplace where I can find new students". Student Portal is not that, and we will not pretend otherwise. It does not generate leads.
The second is "I already have my students — many came from Preply at some point — and I need a real place to run my tutoring business outside the marketplace". That is where Student Portal fits.
This article is for the second group.
The simplest way to think about it
Preply is a global tutoring marketplace, especially strong for languages. It connects independent tutors with students from anywhere in the world. It handles discovery, the trial lesson, and the first payment, and takes a commission in return.
Student Portal is the operations tool for everything that happens after that first match: a recurring schedule, payment tracking, homework, lesson notes, and a portal for the student or parent.
In other words: Preply gets the student to your inbox. Student Portal helps you keep your business organized once they become a regular.
A lot of experienced Preply tutors already work this way — Preply for discovery, their own CRM for long-term students. The only question is which CRM that workflow sits in.
Quick comparison
| Feature | Preply | Student Portal |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free to join, platform takes a percentage of each lesson | Free plan, then flat monthly subscription, no per-lesson fee |
| Marketplace vs solo workflow | Marketplace — students find you | Solo CRM — for students you already have |
| Scheduling | Built-in for marketplace lessons | Recurring weekly schedule with Google Calendar sync |
| Payments | Marketplace processes payment, deducts commission | Track payments, debts, balances; invoice your own students directly |
| Homework / assignments | Basic, often replaced by Google Drive and chat | Yes — assign, submit, review |
| Lesson notes | Limited | Yes, per student, per lesson |
| Multi-language UI | Multilingual, but tutor dashboard is platform-controlled | English and Ukrainian, tutor controls the workspace |
| Best fit | Tutors who want global lead flow from a marketplace | Tutors who want to manage students they already have |
When Preply is the better choice
Be honest. If most of these are true, Preply is doing real work for you that Student Portal cannot:
- You teach a popular language — English, Spanish, French, German, Ukrainian as a foreign language — and demand on Preply is steady.
- You are early in your career and you do not yet have a stable client base.
- You are fine with the platform taking a cut of every lesson, because that cut is buying you discovery.
- Most of your students come from Preply search results, not from referrals or your own brand.
- You do not want to deal with invoicing, currency conversions, or payment chasing on your own.
- You like that the trial lesson and onboarding happen inside a single, well-known platform.
In that situation, Preply is doing the heavy lifting. A separate CRM is not the priority yet — finding students is.
If your week is mostly trial lessons and new matches, plus a few long-term students, you can probably stay on Preply alone for now.
When Student Portal is the better choice
Student Portal becomes a better fit once the marketplace stops being the main bottleneck:
- You have built a roster of regular students, and most are returning week after week, not brand new.
- A growing share of your students come from referrals, your own social media, or your website — not from Preply search.
- The commission per lesson starts to feel heavy at your volume, especially with long-term students.
- You want to invoice students directly, in your own currency, without sharing a percentage of every lesson.
- You want to manage students for any subject — math, programming, music, test prep — not only languages.
- You want a real homework workflow and lesson notes, not a chat-based workaround.
- You want a dashboard you control, with English and Ukrainian UI options.
For tutors at this stage, the marketplace becomes a side channel for new leads, and the real business runs on a CRM the tutor owns.
It is normal — and often smart — to use both at the same time. Preply for discovery, Student Portal for operations. They are different shapes of product, so they do not really compete.
Key differences
A few honest differences worth understanding before you choose:
- Discovery vs. delivery. Preply is built for the moment a student finds a tutor and books a trial. Student Portal is built for everything that happens after the trial.
- Commission vs. flat subscription. Preply earns when you teach. Student Portal does not — it is a flat monthly subscription, regardless of how many lessons you run.
- Marketplace rules vs. your own rules. On a marketplace, scheduling, cancellation, and payment policies are set by the platform. In your own CRM, you set them.
- Homework and lesson notes. Marketplaces rarely structure these well. Tutors usually fall back on Google Drive, chat, and memory. Student Portal makes them a first-class part of the workflow.
- Subject scope. Preply leans heavily on languages. Student Portal works for any subject — STEM, humanities, music, test prep — because it does not care what you teach, only that you teach.
Pricing snapshot
Pricing for both products can change, so always check the official sites before you decide.
The shape of the pricing is what matters most, and the two are very different.
Preply earns from a percentage of every lesson you teach through the platform, and the percentage can be higher for newer tutors. The more you earn through Preply, the more the platform earns from you. That is reasonable when the marketplace is sending you new students. It feels less reasonable when the same student has been with you every week for a year.
Student Portal works on a flat subscription. There is a free plan for up to 3 students, so you can test the workflow before paying anything. Paid plans start low for solo tutors. Pricing is available in UAH for Ukrainian tutors and USD for everyone else. There is no per-lesson commission. Whatever rate you charge your student, you keep.
For a tutor with 10–30 long-term students, the difference between commission and a flat subscription is usually larger than people expect.
How tutors actually use both
The pattern we see most often among experienced Preply tutors:
- Use Preply to fill empty slots when you want more students.
- Once a Preply student becomes a long-term regular, move the operational side into your own CRM — schedule, homework, payments, notes.
- Track which students came from which channel, so you know whether the marketplace is still pulling its weight.
- Slowly grow a referral base so you depend less on any single platform.
This is not anti-Preply. It is just how independent tutoring tends to mature.
If you are setting up your CRM for the first time
If you currently run students out of a notebook, a Google Sheet, or a Telegram chat, do not migrate everything in one weekend. Start small.
A few resources that help:
- Best CRM for Tutors in 2026 — how to choose a CRM if you are coming from spreadsheets.
- Tutor payment tracking — practical templates and reminder logic for tutors. Written in Ukrainian, but the structure works for any market.
- Tutoring schedule — how to structure a recurring weekly schedule for one tutor without losing lessons in chats.
- TutorBird alternative — comparison with another tutoring management platform.
- Teachworks alternative — comparison with a heavier agency-style tool.
Bottom line
Preply and Student Portal are not really competitors. They solve different problems.
If your main pain is "I need more students, especially internationally", Student Portal will not fix that. Use Preply, or build referrals, or both.
If your main pain is "I have students and my week is chaos — payments, homework, scheduling, lesson notes — and a marketplace dashboard is not enough", that is exactly what Student Portal is for.
Most tutors eventually need both: a way to find students, and a way to run them. Preply covers the first. Student Portal covers the second.
Try Student Portal for free — free plan, no credit card required.