Every teacher I know has the same AI problem in November: too many tabs, too little time, and a district email about acceptable use sitting unread in the inbox. The tools are not the hard part anymore. The hard part is figuring out which ones your school will actually let you use, and which ones quietly cost $12.99 a month once the trial ends.
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This guide sorts that out. It covers five tools that have real adoption inside U.S. schools, with the pricing published on their own sites as of November 2026, plus the student data questions that decide whether a tool is allowed in your building at all.
Key Takeaways
- MagicSchool is the safest default for lesson planning and IEP drafts. The free tier is genuinely usable, and Plus runs $8.33 per month billed annually or $12.99 month to month.
- Brisk Teaching is the only tool on this list that lives inside Google Docs, Slides, and YouTube as a browser extension. Free tier includes 20+ tools.
- Diffit wins on differentiation and reading levels, and it never asks students to log in. That single design choice removes most FERPA headaches.
- Khanmigo remains free for U.S. teachers. Parents and independent learners pay $4 per month.
- SchoolAI is the one to look at if you want student-facing AI spaces, but the free trial caps you at 5 Space launches per year.
- None of these replace your judgment on grading, IEP compliance, or parent communication. They draft. You decide.
The Short List
| Tool | Free tier | Paid | Best for | Student logins? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MagicSchool | Yes, 80+ tools with limits | $8.33/mo annual, $12.99/mo monthly | Lesson plans, rubrics, IEP drafts, parent emails | Optional (Student Rooms) |
| Brisk Teaching | Yes, 20+ tools, unlimited feedback uploads | Custom district pricing | Feedback inside Docs, adapting readings | Optional (Brisk Boost) |
| Diffit | Yes, 90-day resource history | Diffit for Schools, custom quote | Differentiated texts, ELL and SPED support | No |
| Khanmigo | Free for U.S. teachers | $4/mo for parents and learners | Planning tied to Khan Academy content | Yes for learner accounts |
| SchoolAI | 5 Space launches per year | Pro and Scale, district quote | Student-facing AI activities with oversight | Yes |
MagicSchool: The One Most Districts Already Approved
MagicSchool started as a teacher time-saver and turned into a district platform. The company now says it serves roughly 7 million educators, and it has signed large systems including Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, one of the ten largest districts in the country, in June 2026.
The product is a catalog of pre-built tools rather than a blank chat box, which is why it survives review. You pick “rubric generator” or “IEP goal assistant” or “text leveler,” fill in a short form, and get a structured output you can export to Google Docs or Slides. For a teacher who has never used generative AI, that structure is the difference between a useful draft and a blank page.
Pricing is straightforward. The Forever Free plan is for individual teachers exploring the product. Plus is $8.33 per user per month billed annually, or $12.99 month to month, and unlocks unlimited generations, unlimited output history, Studio Mode editing, Student Rooms, and class-wide writing feedback. Enterprise is custom, and that is where single sign-on, SIS and LMS integration through Clever, ClassLink, Canvas, and Schoology, district document alignment, and admin dashboards live.
One caveat worth knowing before you build a workflow around it: the free tier has generation quotas, and the terms restrict commercial resale of outputs. If you are writing curriculum to sell, read the terms first.
Brisk Teaching: The One That Lives in Your Browser
Brisk takes the opposite approach. Instead of asking you to visit a new site, it installs as a Chrome or Edge extension and appears inside the tools you already have open. Highlight a reading in Google Docs and ask for a simplified version. Open a YouTube video and pull a summary or a set of questions. Drop a rubric onto a stack of essays and get feedback in batches.
The free plan is not a demo. It includes the extension, 20+ tools, unlimited upload limits on feedback, generation in 50+ languages, and Glow and Grow style feedback. Premium adds 35+ tools and access to stronger models, and district tiers add standards alignment, rostering, admin tool management, and custom data privacy agreements.
Two things make Brisk a practical first pick. First, it does not require you to move your files. Second, the feedback features are built around rubrics you supply, which keeps the teacher in the loop instead of handing grading to a model. If your prep period is 45 minutes and you have 32 essays, that is the feature that matters.
Diffit: Differentiation Without Student Accounts
Diffit does one job and does it well. Give it an article, a book chapter, a PDF, or just a topic, and it produces a leveled reading with vocabulary support, comprehension questions, and graphic organizers. The output is print-optimized, which sounds boring until you remember that most classrooms still run on paper.
The free Basic plan covers classroom-ready content, PDF download, printing, editing, and access to content created in the last 90 days. Diffit for Schools adds export to Google, Canva, and Microsoft formats, alignment to standards, skills, MTSS tiers, and DOK levels, full resource history, and an admin dashboard.
The design choice that matters most is this: Diffit has no student logins and no student-facing AI. Students never touch the tool. A teacher generates the material and hands it out. For a district lawyer, that is a much shorter conversation than a platform where 12-year-olds type prompts.
Khanmigo: Still Free for U.S. Teachers
Khan Academy’s AI assistant has been free for U.S. educators since 2024, and that has not changed. Teachers get planning help, standards-aligned lesson generation tied to Khan Academy’s content library, and on-demand summaries and question sets. Parents and independent learners pay $4 per month for the learner-facing version.
The tradeoff is scope. Khanmigo is strongest in math and science where Khan Academy already has deep content, and thinner in subjects where the underlying library is light. If you teach Algebra I, it is an obvious yes. If you teach a specialized elective, test it against your actual unit before you plan around it.
SchoolAI: The Student-Facing Option
SchoolAI is the only tool here built primarily for students to use directly. Teachers create “Spaces,” which are scoped AI activities with instructions, guardrails, and visibility into what students ask and get back. The free trial gives you 5 Space launches per year, which is enough to run one lesson and decide.
Two details make it easier to fund than most edtech. SchoolAI is ESSA Level III validated, which means it qualifies for Title I, II, III, and IV-A federal funds. It also holds FERPA, COPPA, and SOC2 Type 2 compliance and 1EdTech certification, and ships with 200,000+ premade Spaces so you are not building from zero.
The Pro and Scale tiers add SIS rostering, unlimited launches, admin reporting, LMS embedding, and student-level insights. Those are district purchases, not teacher purchases. If you are an individual teacher, treat the free trial as a pilot and bring data to your instructional technology coordinator.
What Free Actually Costs: Student Data
Every tool above has a privacy page. Almost none of them will save you if you paste identifiable student information into a prompt. District policies have converged on a few rules that are worth internalizing regardless of which tool you pick.
Grossmont Union High School District’s board policy on artificial intelligence, for example, treats student data protection as a condition of use and requires staff to follow existing data governance rather than inventing new workflows. The PSJA ISD AI guidebook in Texas takes a similar line: approved tools only, no personally identifiable student data in prompts, and human review before anything reaches a family.
In practice, that means three habits. Strip names before you paste an IEP or a writing sample. Check whether your district has an approved tool list before you create accounts with a school email. And never let a tool send anything to a parent without you reading it first. A generated email that misstates a service minute or a grade is your signature, not the model’s.
A Realistic Free Stack
If you have no budget and no district license, this combination covers most of a week:
- MagicSchool free for lesson plans, rubrics, and parent drafts. Keep a document of your best prompts so you are not rebuilding them each time.
- Brisk free for feedback inside Google Docs and for adapting readings you already have.
- Diffit free for leveled texts and ELL scaffolding. Download to PDF the same day, because the free tier only keeps 90 days of history.
- Khanmigo free if you teach a subject Khan Academy covers well.
That stack costs nothing and covers planning, differentiation, feedback, and family communication. What it does not cover is a shared, admin-visible system where your department can see what everyone is doing. That is what the paid tiers are actually selling, and it is a reasonable thing for a school to buy.
Two supporting tools are worth the extra tab. Grammarly catches the errors in the emails and letters you send home, which is where a typo does the most damage. Notion holds your prompt library and unit plans in one place so next August is easier than this one. If you also build slides and worksheets, Canva has a free education tier and is the fastest route from a Diffit text to something printable.
For adjacent reading, our Canva vs Figma vs Adobe Firefly comparison covers the design side in more depth, and the Grammarly vs ProWritingAid vs QuillBot breakdown is useful if writing feedback is your main use case.
How I Evaluated
I did not run a classroom trial, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Everything above comes from vendor pricing and feature pages, published district AI policies, and public adoption announcements, all checked in the first week of November 2026. Where a number could change without notice, I named the source so you can re-check it before a purchase order.
What I weighted: whether the free tier is usable without a credit card, whether the tool requires student accounts, whether pricing is published or hidden behind a quote, and whether the vendor has actual district compliance documentation rather than a marketing claim. Tools that failed the student-data question were left out even when their features looked strong.
FAQ
Is MagicSchool really free?
Yes, on the Forever Free plan for individual teachers, with generation limits. Unlimited generations, Student Rooms, and class-wide feedback require Plus at $8.33 per month billed annually or $12.99 monthly.
Can I use these tools with student IEP data?
Not with names or identifiers attached. Strip personally identifiable information first, and check your district’s approved tool list. IEP drafting tools produce drafts for a qualified team to review, not finalized documents.
Which tool is best for grading essays?
Brisk, because batch feedback against your own rubric happens inside Google Docs where the essays already are. Read every comment before it reaches a student.
Do any of these work offline?
No. All five require an internet connection. Diffit’s print output is the closest thing to an offline workflow, since students work from paper.
The Bottom Line
Start with the free tiers and one unit you already teach. MagicSchool for the plan, Brisk for the feedback, Diffit for the leveled reading. Run it for two weeks and count the minutes you got back. If the number is real, that is your argument for a building license, and it is a much better argument than a feature comparison chart.
If your district is still deciding, the question to ask is not which tool has the most features. It is which vendor will sign your data privacy agreement and show you where student data goes. Everything else is a detail you can change later.