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What's a good ClassIn alternative for online tutors?

A good ClassIn alternative for an independent tutor is a virtual classroom built for live lessons that your students can join from a link in their browser, that holds up on their internet connection, and that charges in a way that fits how much you teach. A tutoring company also needs an admin side and its own branding. Koala Go is one option: a browser-based classroom for 1-on-1 and small-group lessons, with a shared whiteboard, a cobrowser and a 3D Playground for young learners. Invoicing (WeChat Pay included) works on every plan, including the free one, and lesson booking comes with the paid plans. Whichever classroom you pick, teach one full lesson on it with a real student, on their device and at their usual time, before you move anyone else.

ClassIn is a virtual classroom made by EEO. Its own site offers it to K-12 schools, universities, tutoring companies and independent teachers, so "ClassIn alternative" means different things to different people. This page is for two of them: independent tutors who find their own students and bill families directly (many of them ESL tutors), and tutoring companies and language schools that run lessons for their own students. If you teach on ClassIn because an agency or a school assigns your classes, the platform is their call, not yours. If you're a student looking for the ClassIn app or your login, that's on ClassIn's own site. We build Koala Go, so the page ends with where it fits and where it doesn't. Everything before that is the checklist we'd use whichever classroom you move to.

Why tutors start looking

Tutors who change classrooms usually have one of these reasons in mind:

  • The price stops matching how much you teach. Look at how a platform bills as well as the headline number: monthly or for a term up front, per teacher, per student or per lesson hour. The same plan can be cheap at forty lessons a week and expensive at ten.
  • You want getting in to be easier for families. Every install, update and forgotten password turns into a message you answer five minutes before a lesson. A link that opens in the browser, with no account for the student, removes most of them.
  • Your students are young. A six-year-old needs the lesson itself to hold their attention: something to touch on the board, something to earn, something to look forward to at the end.
  • You want the office in the same place. Booking, invoices and something to show parents, without a separate app for each.
  • You're going independent. You taught for a company that ran its lessons on ClassIn, you're building your own practice now, and you need a classroom of your own.

What to check in any ClassIn alternative

  1. How a student gets into the lesson. Ask what a new family has to do before lesson one: install an app, create an account, or just open a link. Then try it yourself on the kind of device your students actually use, often a parent's tablet or an older laptop, not your own computer.
  2. The connection where your students are. If your students are in mainland China, this comes first and decides everything else. Test any platform, ours included, with a real student in China at the time they normally have lessons, not just a quick midday check. Our page on teaching English to students in mainland China covers what to test and the workarounds that help.
  3. What happens to your lesson materials. If you built lessons as ClassIn blackboard files (EDB files), check whether the new classroom can open them before you count on it. Ours can't, so plan to rebuild from your original slides, PDFs and images. Start with the five lessons you teach most and rebuild the rest as they come up.
  4. The size and shape of your classes. One-to-one and small groups need different things from a 30-student class or a livestream. Check the student limit per lesson on the plan you'd actually buy, and whether you need breakout rooms.
  5. What keeps young students engaged. Rewards they earn, things they can move on the board, a game at the end. If you teach under-10s, try the engagement tools in a real lesson, not in the demo.
  6. Everything outside the lesson. List what you do between lessons today: messaging families, setting homework, sending recordings, scheduling, taking payment. For each one, check whether the new classroom does it, or which app will. This is the item tutors most often miss when they switch.
  7. How families pay you. Families in mainland China mostly pay with WeChat Pay or Alipay rather than international cards. Make sure the payment path works before the first invoice, not after it.
  8. Who answers when it breaks. Ask how support works and when it's available, and try it once during your test week.

How to switch without losing a family

  1. Check your dates. If you paid for a term in advance, find out when it ends and what happens to unused time, and plan the move around that date.
  2. Rebuild your most-used lessons first. Five good lessons in the new classroom are worth more than fifty half-moved ones.
  3. Teach one real lesson with your most patient family. On their device, on their connection, at their usual time. Write down everything you had to explain.
  4. Send each family one short message. The new link, one sentence on how to join, the date it starts, and how to pay if that's changing too. If they pay with WeChat Pay, include our WeChat Pay instructions.
  5. Move families over a few weeks, not in one night. Keep the old classroom until the last family has had a good lesson in the new one.
  6. Agree on a backup for the first lessons. A WeChat or WhatsApp call you can fall back on if a first connection fails, so one bad start doesn't cost you a student.

Where Koala Go fits

Koala Go is the browser-based virtual classroom we build for online tutors who teach 1-on-1 and small groups, many of them teaching young learners, ESL or specialist subjects like reading. Plenty of the ESL tutors on Koala Go teach children in mainland China. Koala Free costs nothing, Koala Pro is $25.99/month ($21.99/month billed annually), and Koala Platinum is $49.99/month ($39.99/month billed annually).

Job In Koala Go Plan
Getting in Students open your link, type their name and wait in your waiting room. No account, nothing to install, and your link stays the same every week. Every plan.
The lesson Video, a shared whiteboard, a cobrowser (you and the student use the same live webpage instead of watching a screen share) and a 3D Playground where students walk an avatar around. Every plan. Free covers up to 4 students per session with a limited cobrowser; Pro removes the cobrowser limit.
Rewards You award gems during the lesson, and students spend them on items for their space in the Playground. Pro includes 300 gems a month to award; Platinum includes 2,000.
Your materials JPEG and PNG images on Free; PDF, PowerPoint and Word files on Pro. Lessons are saved as activities, so next week opens where you stopped. Koala doesn't open ClassIn's EDB files. Free keeps up to 3 activities; Pro and Platinum keep as many as you like.
Chat In-lesson chat that can translate messages, handy when a parent sits in and English isn't their first language. Pro.
Recordings Recorded to your own computer, or cloud recordings of your classes. Pro records locally; Platinum adds cloud recordings.
Booking Our scheduling portal. You set weekly availability, families book in their own timezone, and the booked lesson opens your classroom. Pro. Platinum adds booking-policy controls and two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync.
Invoicing Create an invoice in the classroom and the parent pays online. You invoice in your own currency and the parent can pay in theirs through the payment platform; families in mainland China can pay with WeChat Pay. Every plan. Our fee is 4.5% per invoice on Free, 3.5% on Pro and 0% on Platinum, on top of the payment platform's own fees.
Parent updates Auto-generated class notes from cloud-recorded lessons: an AI-drafted lesson report you review, then download as a PDF or email to the parent. Platinum.
Students in mainland China A Hong Kong route into mainland China for the classroom, and cobrowser sessions with separate handling for mainland China. Nothing to set up on your side; if a student can't connect, our support team can point them to the China route. No plan requirement.

Some honest limits. Connectivity into mainland China is something we keep working on, not something we've solved: some lessons still see slow connections, black video or freezes, and we'd rather you find that out in a test lesson than in a paid one. Koala is built for 1-on-1 and small groups, not 30-student classes, lectures or livestreams. There's no homework or test system, no parent messaging inbox for independent tutors, and we don't send lesson reminders, so those jobs stay in whatever app you already use with families (WeChat, for a lot of ESL tutors). There's no graphing canvas or full equation editor for advanced STEM. And Koala works on an iPad, but it's rougher there than on a laptop.

If you run a tutoring company or language school

Koala for Business is the same classroom for a company with many tutors: branded with your logo on your own domain (or a Koala subdomain we set up for you), with every Koala Pro teaching feature turned on for every tutor and a business dashboard for your team. Admins can copy lesson activities from one tutor's library to others', which helps when a new tutor starts on your curriculum. China routing is part of setting up your branded classroom. If you'd rather keep the booking system you already run, our API lets it create lessons in Koala and get back a teacher link and a student link for each one, and students still don't need an account. The standard API comes with the plan; custom development is quoted separately. Pricing is by usage, $1.10 per student per active hour with a $110 monthly minimum; the details are on our page for tutoring companies. How Koala for Business handles scheduling, student records and parent bookings is on tutoring business management software, and the API workflow is on online tutoring platform APIs.

You can try Koala Go without installing anything at classroom.teachwithkoala.com and teach a real lesson on Koala Free. If you're weighing a move from ClassIn and want to know whether Koala fits your students, write to us at koala@teachwithkoala.com.

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