Magoosh vs Kaplan GRE Course Comparison

If you’re considering Magoosh vs Kaplan GRE courses, then you are likely among the roughly 400,000 American students planning to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in 2021. Magoosh and Kaplan are two premier test prep providers to consider for your GRE prep.

Magoosh’s courses are self-directed (“on-demand”) while Kaplan’s more versatile courses are on-demand, live online, or in-person. Both Magoosh and Kaplan made our list for the 5 Best Gre Prep Courses for this year, so rest easy knowing that you can’t go wrong with either of these courses.

Each company offers a free trial to test out its learning platform, instruction methods, and materials. Let’s dive into this head-to-head matchup.

Overview: Magoosh vs Kaplan GRE Course

Before we get into the details of their respective features, here is a brief introduction to each GRE prep company.

Magoosh GRE Prep Course

Magoosh achieved test prep prominence with its no-frills, all-online format, a low price point (1/4 the cost of GRE test prep competitors), a solid 7-day guarantee, and a 5-point score improvement guarantee.

Magoosh has amassed a 4.7/5 star rating on TrustPilot.

Kaplan GRE Prep Course

Across the world, 2.1 million students take Kaplan’s various test prep courses each year. For GRE prep, Kaplan offers on-demand, live online, and in-person learning options. GRE preppers who use Kaplan have the option of adding “extras” like 3 hours of personal tutoring and additional coursework (at a higher price tier, of course).

Kaplan has a 4.6/5 star rating on TrustPilot.

Magoosh vs Kaplan GRE Review: Head-to-Head Matchup:

Now that you know a little about each company, let’s get into the meat of the Kaplan vs Magoosh GRE prep course comparison.

Price

The price category – which is a dealbreaker for many of us on a tight budget – is where Magoosh shines in contrast to Kaplan. As a student, you are paying a premium for the name recognition and reputation of Kaplan. For some, the personal comfort of knowing that they are learning with arguably the industry leader in test prep is worth the extra money.

A lot of GRE preppers, though, just want the essential test prep materials and tools at the lowest price point possible. If you are in this camp, then Magoosh should be your top choice for price among Kaplan vs Magoosh GRE options.

Practice Questions & Tests

Kaplan’s practice questions and tests set it apart from most other test prep providers that it competes against, including Magoosh.

Kaplan’s customizable “Qbank” question bank and personalized homework assignments, likewise, are optimized to identify and meet your individual prep needs based on your strengths and weaknesses.

When building out a quiz in Kaplan’s GRE Qbank, you can choose the timing mode, question difficulty, and what question types and content areas you’d like to be quizzed on:

Kaplan offers:

• 7 full-length practice tests
• 5,000+ practice questions

No rundown of Kaplan’s test practices and test would be complete without a nod to their “Official Test Day Experience” that augments its practice tests by simulating the environment of the actual task in a real-life exam setting at a local testing facility.

Magoosh takes its practice test questions from your “pool of unanswered” practice questions, so the practice questions and tests that you get are essentially reconfigurations of the same set. You can get limited clarification on practice questions with support resources like explanatory links to external sources, alternative explanations in other Magoosh lessons, and other aids. Magoosh offers its students:

• 3 practice tests
• 1,000 practice questions

Both in terms of volume and quality, Kaplan edges out Magoosh in the practice test and question arena.

Class Materials & Instruction

In the class materials and instruction Magoosh vs Kaplan GRE matchup, Kaplan again outperforms Magoosh.

When you enroll in Kaplan’s “LiveOnline Plus” course, you will get the following books in addition to the wealth of online material:

• GRE Math Foundations ($299 value)
• GRE Advanced Math ($299 value)

Although the verbal and quantitative (math) sections are the most challenging parts of the GRE to many learners, the test does also have a writing component called the “Analytical Writing Assessment” (AWA). If you score well on the two main sections but fail the AWA portion of the test, your overall test results will suffer.

Kaplan’s biggest advantage in the materials and instruction competition, arguably, is the essay help that it offers. When you enroll in Kaplan’s prep courses, you can send two practice essays to test prep experts who review them and send personalized feedback to help you optimize your writing.

You also have on-demand access to Kaplan’s touted GRE channel with tons of 40+ hours of recorded lessons – enough for days of test prep if you are so inclined.

Magoosh’s GRE courses are all-online, so you won’t be getting any physical books or other materials in the mail. You will, though, be able to access dozens of hours of high-quality video lessons.

Learning Experience & Platform

Kaplan’s LiveOnline course option features 21 hours of live instruction hosted on its online platform. At the highest price point ($1,299 for LiveOnline Plus), you can access 3 hours of one-on-one tutoring.

You also have more options for how to learn with Kaplan compared to Magoosh – in-person, online, or a hybrid design.

Analytics are an important area of test prep if you want to optimize your study plan for time-effectiveness. When you take one of Kaplan’s practice tests, you receive a “Smart Report” that analyzes your performance, noting areas of strength and weakness to optimize your study plan moving forward.

Magoosh’s online dashboard, home to its own analytics tools — although fewer R&D resources might have gone into developing them compared to Kaplan — is nothing to scoff at.

Magoosh’s “Suggested Lessons” feature uses analytic tools similar to Kaplan’s to identify the areas that you are struggling with the most and focus your future learning on them. Its “Score Predictor” function crunches the numbers from your past performances on the platform and offers a prediction regarding how you will do on the actual test. You can also compare your performance to that of competing students on the dashboard.

Although there is no live instruction or tutoring component of Magoosh’s GRE prep courses, test experts are available via email to help with any issues that you are struggling with while you study.

Both companies, in short, have technology-driven curriculum and prep tools that bear fruit come test day in the form of higher scores. Kaplan’s, though, are just a bit more user-friendly and comprehensive.

Instructors

When you enroll in Kaplan’s LiveOnline or LiveOnline Plus, you’ll be learning with a team of GRE test prep experts who know the proven ways to help you increase your score. Kaplan’s GRE prep providers have secondary education degrees, firsthand knowledge of the test, and together have decades of accumulated GRE test prep instruction under their belts.