Ask any middle school teacher forum "what math game should I use?" and three names surface in the same breath: Prodigy, Blooket, Gimkit. They get lumped together as if they were interchangeable, and they are not even close. Two of them are fifteen-minute live events you host from the front of the room. One is a persistent world students inhabit for months. Comparing Blooket to Prodigy is like comparing a pep rally to a library card — both have their place, and neither can do the other's job.
Full disclosure before we start: we make Infinilearn, a persistent math RPG that competes in the same broad space as Prodigy, so we have a horse in this race. We've tried to make this the honest comparison we'd want if we were the ones choosing, and for most of this article Infinilearn doesn't enter the picture at all.
Here's how the three actually differ — on format, math depth, prep time, cost, reporting, and the student-experience problems that never make the marketing page — followed by scenario-based recommendations.
What Each One Actually Is
Prodigy: a world students live in
Prodigy is a free-to-play fantasy RPG for grades 1-8. Students create a wizard, explore, collect pets, and battle by answering math questions that power their spells. Progress persists: a student picks up in March where they left off in February, and many play at home without being asked. It is a solo experience at heart — the class isn't competing in real time, each student is on their own journey through an adaptive question bank.
Blooket: a fifteen-minute event
Blooket is a live quiz game show. You pick a question set, pick a game mode, and host a round; students answer on their devices and the mode wraps the quiz in a competitive or cooperative skin. When the round ends, the experience ends. Nothing persists, and that's by design — it's an event, and the event format is precisely what generates the energy teachers love it for.
Gimkit: a fifteen-minute event with an economy
Gimkit — created, famously, by a high school student — is also a live event, but its modes revolve around an in-game currency. Correct answers earn cash; students spend it mid-round on upgrades and power-ups. That spend-or-save decision adds real strategy, and questions cycle within a round so students re-encounter items they missed. It's the most mechanically interesting of the live tools, and the most expensive.
Math Depth
None of the three teaches math — they all deliver questions. The difference is where the questions come from and what the format lets them be.
Blooket and Gimkit run on question sets you build, import, or borrow from any-subject public libraries. The math is exactly as good as the set, which varies enormously. The format also quietly favors short recall items: a one-step equation (a 6th grade standard) fits a fast-paced round fine, but a two-step equation or a multi-step percent problem — 7th grade material — sits awkwardly under time and economy pressure, and by 8th grade content like linear functions, most teachers stop pretending the format fits and use these tools for vocabulary and fluency instead.
Prodigy brings its own curriculum-aligned question bank spanning grades 1-8, with adaptive placement that adjusts to the student. That's real depth the quiz tools can't match. The honest caveat: Prodigy leans elementary. Its world, art, and tone land best in grades 3-6; seventh and eighth graders often find it young, right when the math is getting serious.
Teacher Prep Time
- Blooket: Minutes, if a good public set exists for your topic. The hidden cost is vetting — a found set needs a question-by-question read, or you're gamifying someone else's typos.
- Gimkit: The same content problem (kits are teacher-made or imported), plus slightly more setup as you tune mode and economy settings. Still measured in minutes once you have a kit you trust.
- Prodigy: Near zero. Content is assigned by grade and placement automatically, and you can create assignments for specific skills. The tradeoff is control: you steer the curriculum from a dashboard rather than choosing the exact questions in play.
Cost
All three are "free," and all three mean something different by it.
- Blooket: The most generous free tier of the three — the core game modes and hosting are free, with a Plus tier at a few dollars a month for extras. Most teachers never pay.
- Gimkit: The thinnest free tier. Realistic classroom use means Gimkit Pro, about $10/month or $60/year as of this writing — and it's typically the teacher's own money.
- Prodigy: Free to play, and every math question is free. The memberships — about $9.95/month, roughly $60-120/year depending on plan — gate the game's rewards: pets, gear, member-only areas. Crucially, this bill is pitched to parents, not teachers, which changes the classroom dynamics in ways we'll get to below.
Data and Reporting
Blooket and Gimkit generate per-game reports: who missed what in today's set, with Gimkit's reporting getting richer on Pro. That's genuinely useful for a review day — you can see at a glance which question sank the room. But it's a snapshot. The data only covers the questions you happened to load, and there's no longitudinal picture of a student's skills.
Prodigy's persistent format produces persistent data: curriculum-referenced reports on what each student has practiced and mastered over weeks, visible in free teacher and parent dashboards. If you want reporting you can act on at conference time rather than just at the end of a game, the persistent format wins by default — an event can only report on the event. This is the least discussed and arguably most important difference between the two species: a live quiz tells you how review day went, while a persistent platform tells you where each student actually stands.
The Student-Experience Problems Nobody Puts in the Brochure
Every tool has a failure mode you only discover after rollout. These are the big three here.
- Prodigy's membership divide: Because rewards are gated by a parent-paid membership, a classroom of thirty splits visibly into members with rare pets and member-only areas, and free players watching through the window. The math access is equal; the motivational economy is not, and kids notice immediately. The in-game membership prompts are aimed at children, which some families resent.
- Blooket and Gimkit's content dependency: The game shell is polished; the math is whatever set you loaded. A weak set means students drilling errors at high speed with points attached. There is no adaptivity in either — your strongest and weakest students answer the same questions all round.
- Speed pressure: Both live tools reward answering fast. For fact fluency that's fine; for multi-step problems it teaches exactly the wrong lesson — that the careful solver is losing.
None of these are fatal, but all of them are manageable only if you plan for them. If you roll out Prodigy, decide in advance what you'll say when a student asks why they can't get the pet their tablemate has. If you host Blooket or Gimkit, budget vetting time for every set you didn't write yourself, and consider pausing between questions so students work multi-step problems on paper before answering opens. The tools reward the teachers who see the failure modes coming.
Head-to-Head Summary
| Prodigy | Blooket | Gimkit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Format | Persistent solo RPG | Live class event | Live class event with economy |
| Best-fit grades | 1-8, strongest 3-6 | Any subject, big in middle school | Any subject, big in middle school |
| Math content | Built-in adaptive bank | Teacher-made or public sets | Teacher-made or imported kits |
| Prep per session | Near zero | Minutes plus vetting | Minutes plus vetting |
| Free tier | All math free; rewards gated | Generous | Limited |
| Paid tier | About $9.95/mo (parents) | Plus, a few dollars/mo | Pro, about $60/yr (teachers) |
| Reporting | Longitudinal, by skill | Per-game snapshot | Per-game snapshot, richer on Pro |
Which One Fits Your Classroom?
- You want a review-day event and you want it free: Blooket. Its free tier does the whole job, and if the modes go stale there's a deep bench of Blooket alternatives to rotate in.
- Your class is bored of Blooket and you'll actually use it weekly: Gimkit. The economy is the freshest mechanic in the category, and at weekly use, $60 a year works out to pennies per game.
- You teach grades 3-6 and want practice that continues at home: Prodigy. The persistence and adaptive bank are real; just walk in with eyes open about the membership divide.
- You teach grades 5-9 and want persistent practice with nothing paywalled: This is where our own Infinilearn fits — and, disclosure again, we make it. It's a persistent fantasy RPG where every attack, spell, and ability is powered by a Common Core-aligned problem, and the adaptive engine deliberately pulls weapon-attack problems from each student's weakest topics. The full game — all 15 zones, quests, bosses, and every bit of grades 5-9 math — is free with no ads and no reward paywall, and the free teacher tools include a built-in diagnostic and tracking by topic, standard, and student. Honest limits: it's newer and smaller than Prodigy, multiple choice only, and browser-based. Our full Infinilearn vs Prodigy comparison gets into the details.
- You're still mapping the whole territory: Our guide to math games for the classroom covers the full landscape, live and persistent, digital and not.
The Bottom Line
Prodigy, Blooket, and Gimkit aren't three answers to one question — they're answers to two different questions. Blooket and Gimkit answer "how do I make review day something students look forward to?" Prodigy — and Infinilearn — answer "how do students get meaningful practice every week without me photocopying it?" The strongest classrooms we see run one of each: a live event for energy, a persistent platform for the daily grind. Pick the event tool by budget and your class's appetite for novelty, and pick the persistent tool by grade band and how you feel about paywalled rewards.