An IXL family subscription costs about $20 a month as of this writing, which comes to roughly $240 over a school year. For some families that's an easy yes. For a lot of others it's either not affordable or simply not justifiable for a practice website, especially when nobody's certain the kid will use it. The good news is that for middle school math specifically, the free landscape is stronger than it has ever been. The catch is that no single free tool replaces everything IXL does, so you need to know which job you're hiring each one for.
Quick disclosure: we make Infinilearn, one of the free tools on this list, so we are not a neutral party. We've tried to write the guide we'd want as parents, including being straight about what IXL does that free tools genuinely don't.
What You're Actually Replacing
IXL earns its subscription by doing three jobs at once:
- Structured skill practice: every Common Core skill at every grade gets its own drill set. One-step equations (a 6th grade standard), two-step equations (7th), and linear functions (8th) each live in their own strand with a deep bank of problems.
- Diagnosis: IXL's diagnostic pinpoints a student's working level in each strand of math, not just an overall grade level, and keeps updating as they practice.
- Breadth: one subscription covers K-12, so the same account serves a 2nd grader and a 9th grader.
No free tool does all three well. Several do one or two of them excellently. Here are the ones worth your time, matched honestly to the job each actually does.
The Free Alternatives That Actually Hold Up
1. Khan Academy
Best for: All grades · Price: Completely free · Format: Video lessons + mastery practice
Khan Academy is the closest single free equivalent to IXL, and in one important way it's more than an equivalent. It's a nonprofit, there is no premium tier waiting behind the login, and it offers structured practice for every grade organized into courses with mastery levels, unit tests, and course challenges that roughly approximate a diagnostic. It also does something IXL doesn't do at all: teach. Every skill comes with video lessons and worked examples, so when your child isn't just short on practice but genuinely doesn't understand a concept, Khan has an answer where IXL only has more questions.
The weakness is motivation. Khan Academy feels like school, because it essentially is school, delivered kindly and for free. Students who will sit down and work through it get enormous value. Students who avoid math will avoid Khan Academy too, and no dashboard fixes that.
Pros: Free with no upsell, real instruction plus practice, covers every grade. Cons: Requires self-motivation, no game layer, progress depends entirely on the student choosing to show up.
2. Infinilearn
Best for: Grades 5-9 · Price: Free (optional premium) · Format: Fantasy RPG
This one is ours. Infinilearn is a browser-based fantasy RPG where the practice is the gameplay: students explore 15 zones, take on quests and boss fights, and every attack, spell, and ability fires only after solving a real, Common Core-matched math problem. The part most relevant to IXL refugees is the adaptive engine. It tracks accuracy topic by topic, and weapon attacks pull problems from the student's weakest subjects, so practice targets gaps automatically. That's the closest free analog to IXL's "work on exactly what you're weak at," except nobody has to assign it.
The full game is free: every zone, every quest, all of the grades 5-9 math, no ads, and nothing gated. Parents get a free dashboard for one child showing accuracy by topic with strengths and weaknesses; the details live on our parents page. There is an optional premium at $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year that adds deeper reporting (progress trends over time, Common Core standards tracking, unlimited children) plus student cosmetics, but it never gates math content or game progression, and a family replacing IXL on a zero budget doesn't need it. For homeschoolers, Infinilearn is an approved Suncoast Preparatory Academy vendor, so charter families can put educational funds toward Premium if they want the reporting. More on that fit is on our homeschool page.
Pros: Free full game, adaptive practice that targets weak topics, safe multiplayer with preset chat only, runs on any Chromebook or laptop with no install. Cons: Grades 5-9 only, practice rather than instruction, multiple-choice format, browser only with no native mobile app, and newer and smaller than the incumbents on this list.
3. Prodigy Math
Best for: Grades 1-8 · Price: Free to play (membership about $9.95/month) · Format: Fantasy RPG
Prodigy is free to play and the math questions themselves are never paywalled, which technically makes it a free IXL alternative. The caveats matter, though. The membership, at about $9.95 per month, gates the rewards that drive the game's motivation loop (pets, gear, member-only areas), and free players are shown plenty of what they're missing, so expect upgrade pressure at the dinner table. Content leans elementary: it's strongest in the lower grades, and middle schoolers often find both the tone and the question depth thinner than they need. If you're weighing free Prodigy against paying for IXL directly, our IXL vs Prodigy comparison walks through that exact decision.
Pros: Genuinely free math, kids open it voluntarily, native mobile apps. Cons: Elementary-leaning depth, reward paywall creates nagging, engagement can outrun actual learning.
4. Math Playground and Coolmath Games
Best for: Light fluency practice · Price: Free (ad-supported) · Format: Mini-game portals
These free portals are where a lot of "free math games" searches end up. Be clear-eyed about what they are: collections of quick, fun, ad-supported mini-games that mostly exercise arithmetic and logic rather than grade-level standards. There is no diagnostic, no progression, and no reporting. As a Friday treat or a fluency warm-up they're fine. As an IXL replacement they're dessert pretending to be dinner.
Pros: Free, instantly fun, zero setup. Cons: Shallow practice, ads, no alignment or tracking.
5. Desmos and GeoGebra
Best for: Visualizing concepts · Price: Free · Format: Graphing and math tools
These are tools, not curricula, and that's exactly why they earn a slot. When your 8th grader is fighting with slope or linear functions, ten minutes of moving a line around in a free graphing calculator does what forty static problems can't: it makes the concept visible. They won't generate practice sets or track mastery, so they need a plan around them, but as the "see it" layer in a free stack they're outstanding.
Pros: Free, best-in-class visualization, no account required to start. Cons: Not a curriculum, no practice structure, requires an adult or student who knows what to explore.
What You Give Up by Not Paying
Honesty time. If you drop IXL, here's what no free stack fully replaces:
- Diagnostic precision: IXL's diagnostic locates a student's level in each strand with unusual granularity. Khan's course challenges are coarser, and Infinilearn's topic tracking is precise but scoped to grades 5-9 math, so a middle schooler's lingering 3rd grade gap won't show up there by name.
- Breadth in one system: one login, K-12, every kid in the family, one report format. A free stack means assembling two or three tools and being the person who checks them.
- Coverage completeness: IXL has a drill set for essentially everything. Free tools cover the well-traveled standards thoroughly, but the long tail is thinner.
None of that means the $240 is mandatory. It means the price of free is assembly: you become the integration layer. For most families with a grades 5-9 student, that's an hour of setup and a weekly ten-minute check.
How to Combine Free Tools Into a Real Replacement
A working free stack covers three layers: instruction, practice, and fluency. Here's a combination that holds up for a middle schooler:
- Instruction (Khan Academy): when a concept doesn't make sense, watch the lesson for the current unit and work two or three examples with the hints on. Short and targeted beats marathon sessions.
- Practice (Infinilearn or Khan's practice): four sessions a week of about 20 minutes. A game-based tool earns its place here precisely because this is the layer that dies when it depends on willpower. The adaptive targeting means the reps concentrate where accuracy is lowest.
- Fluency (no software required): quick non-digital games finish the job. Deal a deck of cards and play multiplication war; use red cards as negative numbers and black as positive for integer war, which is straight 6th-7th grade number sense; or roll four dice and race to combine them into a target number using any operations.
Check the dashboards once a week, not once a night. If you want a wider menu of options for each layer, our roundup of free math websites for students goes broader than this list, and homeschooling families assembling a complete program from free parts should start with our guide to building a free homeschool math curriculum.
The Bottom Line
IXL is a good product with a real price, and the honest case for paying is diagnostic precision plus K-12 breadth in one place. But if $240 a year isn't happening, a middle schooler is not out of options: Khan Academy replaces the instruction and structured practice, Infinilearn replaces the targeted, gap-seeking practice while making it something a 12-year-old will do without a fight, and a deck of cards replaces the fluency drills. The combination costs nothing but a weekly check-in.
Start with the layer your child is actually missing, add the second tool only when the first one sticks, and judge the whole experiment the same way you'd judge IXL: by whether the practice is happening and the accuracy is moving.