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Choosing an online whiteboard for tutoring

We make one of these, so read this knowing that. What follows is how we would actually choose, including the cases where something else is the better buy.

The short answer

• Teaching one to one, and you want the lesson kept: a tutoring-specific tool. That is us, and a handful of others.
• You already run lessons on Zoom and only need something to write on: a general whiteboard is cheaper and good enough.
• You teach maths or science with an iPad and a pencil: the thing that matters is pen latency and whether a resting palm ruins a stroke. Try before you buy, with the pencil, not with a mouse.
• You are an agency: work out whether you are billed per tutor or per student before anything else. It is the difference between a bill that stays still and one that grows with you.

What actually matters, in order

1. Does the student need an account?

Anything a fourteen-year-old has to install or sign up for will cost you the first ten minutes of a lesson. A link that just opens is worth more than any feature on a list.

2. Does it survive a school network?

School and office networks let the page load and then block the connection a whiteboard needs. Most tools simply fail, and it looks like your fault. Ask specifically what happens, not whether it "works in the browser". What that looks like in a lesson.

3. Does the lesson still exist next term?

A canvas you scroll forever is fine during the hour and useless in April. Pages, books and an export are what turn lessons into something a student can revise from.

4. Pen quality

Pressure, palm rejection and latency. This is the one thing you cannot tell from a feature list, and the one your students will notice every single week.

5. What is metered

Students, storage, pages, sessions. Caps rarely bite on day one; they bite in month four, when moving is expensive.

The kinds of tool

Where we are not the answer

We would rather say this here than have you discover it.

• You teach groups, not one to one. Tutorboard is built around a tutor and a student. A class of twenty is not what it is for.
• You have a handful of students across a lot of tutors. We charge per tutor, so a per-student tool will be cheaper for you. The sums are on the agencies page.
• You want an infinite mood board. Our pages are deliberately pages. If you want to zoom out over a wall of sticky notes, use a general whiteboard.
• You need offline teaching today. You need a connection. Offline is being built; it is not here yet.

Where we think we are strongest

• Nothing to install, for anybody. Students and parents never install a thing, on any device.
• Blocked networks. When a school firewall refuses the usual connection, the lesson moves to an ordinary HTTPS path and keeps going, and the call is relayed rather than failing.
• Real exam calculators. A ClassWiz and an fx-CG50 you both see, with the keys in the right places, because the keystrokes are half of what you are teaching.
• What is not metered. Storage, pages, books, recordings and exports are not counted, and nothing is charged per session.
• On-device transcription. Lesson audio never leaves your Mac. Only text is sent, only when you ask for a report.

Compared one to one

Tutorboard and Writeboard — the closest comparison, and the one where the per-tutor against per-student question decides it.