DeltaMath won teacher loyalty the old-fashioned way: unlimited auto-graded practice problems, a free tier that is actually usable rather than a demo, and assignment controls built by someone who clearly understands how math teachers work. The paid tiers — roughly $100-200 a year per teacher as of this writing — add instructional videos, student help features, and test-security tools, but plenty of teachers run entire courses on the free version. That's rare, and it's why DeltaMath loyalty runs deep.
So this is not a "ditch DeltaMath" article. It's an article about DeltaMath's one structural limit, which no feature update can fix: students experience it as homework because it is homework. It arrives assigned, it gets graded, and it is resented in roughly the proportion all homework is resented. DeltaMath can make practice efficient, visible, and easy to grade. What it cannot do is make a student practice math when nobody is making them.
Full disclosure before the list: we make Infinilearn, which appears below. We've tried to write this the way we'd want it written if we were the ones choosing tools for a classroom — including a plain section on where DeltaMath still beats everything else here.
Think in Jobs, Not Replacements
The most useful way to evaluate DeltaMath alternatives is to stop asking "what replaces DeltaMath?" and start asking "what job am I hiring for?" DeltaMath does one job — assigned, accountable practice — extremely well. The tools below do different jobs:
- Practice students choose voluntarily: the after-the-worksheet problem. You need students getting reps they didn't have to be assigned.
- Review-day energy: whole-class engagement before a test, when the room needs a pulse.
- Instruction gaps: students who can't do the practice because they never understood the concept.
Most teachers reading this should end up with DeltaMath plus one of these, not one of these instead of DeltaMath. Budget matters here too, so it's worth saying early: every tool below has a genuinely free tier, which means assembling the stack costs setup time and nothing else — the same property that made DeltaMath spread teacher-to-teacher in the first place.
Job 1: Practice Students Choose Voluntarily — Infinilearn
Best for: Grades 3-9 · Price: Free (optional premium) · Format: Fantasy RPG
This is ours, so weigh it accordingly. Infinilearn is a browser-based fantasy RPG where students battle monsters, run quests across 15 zones, and fight bosses — and every attack, spell, and ability is powered by solving a real math problem matched to Common Core standards for grades 3-9. It runs on Chromebooks with no install and no IT setup, and multiplayer is limited to preset quick-chat phrases, so there's no open chat to worry about.
The classroom-relevant difference from DeltaMath is who initiates the practice. On DeltaMath, problems get done because you assigned them. In Infinilearn, a student who wants to beat the next boss has to solve problems to do it — and the adaptive engine decides which ones. It tracks each student's accuracy topic by topic, and weapon attacks pull problems from that student's weakest subjects. Your 7th grader who breezes through one-step equations but stalls on two-step equations (the 6th-to-7th-grade jump in the Common Core progression) will automatically see more two-step problems mid-battle, without you building a differentiated assignment for them.
The teacher tools are free, not freemium-in-disguise: you can create classrooms, run a built-in diagnostic that locates each student's level, assign content, and track performance by topic, standard, and student. And the full game is free for every student — every zone, every quest, all the math, no ads — so you never have the awkward situation where the kids whose families pay get a better version of your class activity.
Pros: students play it without being assigned to; free teacher dashboards with a diagnostic and per-standard tracking; adaptive practice that self-targets each student's gaps; safe, ad-free, Chromebook-friendly. Cons: grades 3-9 only, so it thins out above Algebra 1 while DeltaMath keeps going deep into high school; multiple choice only, with no typed free-response yet; newer and smaller than the incumbents; it's an engagement layer, not an assignment engine — you won't replicate DeltaMath's fine-grained problem-set control here.
Job 2: Review-Day Energy — Blooket and Gimkit
DeltaMath the night before a test is technically review, but it doesn't change the temperature of the room. Live game platforms do, and two dominate middle school classrooms.
Blooket
Best for: Whole-class review · Price: Free core; Plus tier a few dollars a month · Format: Quiz game-show modes
Blooket is hugely popular with middle schoolers for a reason: the game-show modes are genuinely fun, the core is free, and you can host a live round or let students run some modes solo. The honest caveat is content quality — question sets are any-subject and community-made, so quality varies. For a review day on, say, proportional relationships, plan to build or vet your own set rather than trusting the first search result.
Gimkit
Best for: Live modes with strategy · Price: Free tier is limited; Pro about $10/month or $60/year · Format: Live games with an in-game currency economy
Gimkit layers an economy on top of quizzing — students earn currency for correct answers and spend it on upgrades — which adds a strategic hook that plain trivia lacks. (It was also created by a high school student, a fact we're partial to, since Infinilearn was too.) The free tier is limited enough that regular users generally end up on Pro. If your Gimkit budget or free-tier limits are the sticking point, we've rounded up Gimkit alternatives separately.
And don't overlook the zero-tech version of this job. A whiteboard relay — teams of four, one marker per team, each student completes one step of a multi-step problem before passing the marker — generates the same review-day energy with no accounts and no Chromebook cart, and it forces something no quiz platform does: each student has to check the previous teammate's step before building on it, which is exactly the error-checking habit that solving two-step equations and multi-step percent problems demands. The energy on review day comes from the competition, not the software.
One honest limit the live platforms share: quiz formats reward speed, which fits fact retrieval and one-step recall better than multi-step work. They're the energy layer for review day, not the practice layer for the rest of the unit. For a broader menu across formats, see our guide to math games for the classroom.
Job 3: Instruction Gaps — Khan Academy
Best for: Students missing prerequisite concepts · Price: Completely free · Format: Video lessons + mastery practice
Every math teacher knows the student for whom more DeltaMath problems is exactly the wrong prescription: they're not short on reps, they're short on the concept. Assigning fifteen more two-step equation problems to a student who never understood inverse operations produces fifteen wrong answers and one discouraged kid.
Khan Academy is the free answer to that job. It's a nonprofit with video lessons and mastery practice for every grade, which makes it the tool you hand a student who needs to be re-taught, not re-drilled — the 8th grader shaky on linear functions because 7th-grade proportional reasoning never landed can actually go back and rebuild it. The tradeoff is motivation: Khan Academy requires self-direction, and the students who most need remediation are often the least likely to self-direct. It works best when you assign a specific video and skill rather than pointing at the whole library. If Khan's format doesn't land with your students, we've covered Khan Academy alternatives too.
Where DeltaMath Still Wins
Now the section a lot of alternatives posts skip. There are jobs where DeltaMath remains the best tool on this page, and pretending otherwise would make everything above less credible:
- Problem variety at the Algebra level and beyond: DeltaMath's depth in high school content is the moat. If you teach Algebra 1 and up, the sheer range of auto-graded problem types is hard to match anywhere, and none of the engagement tools above go as deep.
- Fine-grained assignment control: choosing exactly which problem types, how many, due when, for which students — this is DeltaMath's home turf. Game-based tools adapt to the student; DeltaMath obeys the teacher. Both have their place, and for targeted skill assignments you want the latter.
- Test mode: the paid tiers' test-security tools solve a real problem — assessment in a world of solver apps — that no game addresses at all.
- Accountability you can grade: when practice needs to produce a gradebook entry, "assigned and auto-graded" is a feature, not a bug. Voluntary engagement is wonderful and also not something you can enter in an LMS.
The practical takeaway: for most middle school math teachers, the move isn't DeltaMath or an alternative. It's DeltaMath for accountable practice and assessment, plus an engagement layer that gets students doing math nobody assigned. Those layers don't compete for the same minutes — one owns homework, the other owns the time that currently belongs to whatever else is open on the Chromebook.
The Bottom Line
DeltaMath is what it says it is: unlimited auto-graded practice with real teacher control and a genuinely usable free tier. Its limit is baked into its identity — assigned practice can be efficient, but it can't be wanted. If your students' problem is accountability, keep DeltaMath and stop reading alternatives posts. If their problem is that math practice only happens under compulsion, add a layer built for voluntary reps: Infinilearn for sustained, adaptive practice in grades 3-9, Blooket or Gimkit for review-day energy, Khan Academy for the students who need teaching before they need practicing.
Every tool in that sentence has a free tier a teacher can set up tonight without a purchase order. Try the combination on one class for two weeks and let the data — DeltaMath completion rates included — tell you whether the engagement layer is earning its place.