IXL vs Sprout Tutor in Victoria: Is IXL Worth It, and What It Does Not Cover

IXL is a large, polished practice site that costs A$15.95 to A$29.95 a month in Australia and is aligned to the Australian Curriculum, not the Victorian Curriculum. Sprout Tutor is daily practice coded to the Victorian Curriculum Version 2.0 only, free while it is in beta. If you want one subscription that covers every subject from Preschool to Year 12 and works in any state, IXL is worth the money. If your child is at a Victorian school or you homeschool in Victoria and you want practice that follows the same content descriptions their teacher or your learning plan uses, with every answer visible to you, the comparison tilts the other way.

We build Sprout Tutor, so this is an interested comparison. Every Sprout Tutor claim below was checked against our own code, every IXL claim comes from IXL’s own Australian pages as read on 26 October 2026, and there is a section on what IXL does better. Prices change, so check IXL’s family pricing page before you buy.

Side by side

What a year of IXL costs

IXL’s Australian page lists monthly prices only: A$15.95 for maths or English, A$24.95 for the combo of both, and A$29.95 for all access, which adds science from Foundation to Year 10. Twelve months at those prices is A$191.40, A$299.40 or A$359.40. The page does not print an annual price, so if you are quoted one at checkout, compare it with those figures. The page also does not say what a second child costs, which is worth asking before you sign up a family.

For context, Maths Pathway Homeschool is $299 a year per child for maths alone (our Maths Pathway comparison has the detail), and one hour a week with a Melbourne tutor runs into the thousands a year (see what maths tutoring in Melbourne costs). IXL sits at the cheap end of paid help. The question is whether it is the right kind of help for a Victorian child.

The curriculum question: Australian, not Victorian

IXL says its skills are aligned to “the Australian Curriculum, version 9.0, the Australian Curriculum, version 8.4, the Australian Minimum Standards, and the Australian Curriculum”. There is no Victorian page: the address you would expect for one, au.ixl.com/standards/victoria, redirects to the national maths page. That is a reasonable choice for a company selling to every state, and for most topics in most years the two curricula overlap heavily.

But Victoria does not teach the Australian Curriculum. It teaches the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, which is built from the national one and then changed: content moved between levels, extra content added, wording rewritten. Some examples we have checked against both datasets on other pages: Victoria adds rounding money to the nearest 5 cents at Level 4, puts prepositions into Level 1 grammar, and gives modal verbs their own Level 3 content description. Our page on the Victorian Curriculum versus the Australian Curriculum sets out where they part ways.

This matters in two situations. If your child is at a Victorian school, their report and their teacher’s planning use Victorian content descriptions, so practice organised by the national codes will be close but not the same, and you will be doing the translation. If you homeschool in Victoria, the VRQA does not require you to follow either curriculum, but your learning plan has to name the apps you use and say what they cover; see naming apps in a Victorian learning plan. Either tool can go in that plan. A tool coded to the Victorian content descriptions makes the “what does it cover” line shorter to write.

The real difference: what “mastered” is made of

Both tools adapt. What matters is what the adapting is made of, because that decides what the number on your screen means.

IXL uses the SmartScore. In IXL’s own words, it starts at 0 when a student starts a skill, rises with correct answers and falls with wrong ones, and “is calculated using many factors, including the number of questions completed, question difficulty, and consistency”. It is based on “IXL’s proprietary algorithm”. A score of 80 is proficient, 90 is excellent and 100 is mastery, and “the number of questions it takes to master a skill varies with every student”. The strength is that it is one clear number per skill. The limit is that you cannot work out from the outside exactly why it moved or how many more questions mastery will take.

Sprout Tutor uses fixed rules you can read. Within a Year there are three tiers, support, core and stretch. Three correct in a row moves up a tier; five wrong in a row moves down. Five wrong in a row at the support tier drops the working Year by one, and three right in a row at stretch climbs it by one. A revealed answer counts as wrong. A topic is ten questions. These are plain functions in our code rather than a model’s judgement, and every change of working Year is written to a log you can read. The whole rulebook is in how Sprout Tutor decides what comes next.

Neither is better in general. A single score per skill is easy to set as a goal (“get to 80 before dinner”), and IXL’s analytics roll it up nicely. Fixed rules are easier to trust when you need to know why your child is suddenly doing Year 3 questions in Year 5, and they mean a child can work below their assigned Year on one subject without anyone having to decide that in advance. Our page on working at a different level explains why that matters.

What the parent can see

IXL’s family membership includes progress tracking through IXL Analytics: which skills were practised and the SmartScores reached. That is a good summary of effort and progress.

Sprout Tutor’s parent dashboard is built around the questions themselves. You see each recent question as it was shown to your child, the answer they gave, whether they used a hint or revealed the answer, and every change to their working Year with the reason. It shows the latest 100 attempts and the latest 50 Year changes. It does not record time spent, and it does not compare your child with anyone else. The details are in what the parent dashboard shows.

The practical difference: IXL tells you how much and how well. Sprout Tutor shows you which question and which answer, which is what you need when your child says “I just don’t get fractions” and you want to see the actual mistake.

What IXL does better

A comparison that cannot name what the other product does better is not worth reading. Here are five.

• Breadth. More than 6,400 skills, maths and English to Year 12, and a Real-Time Diagnostic that places a child across a whole subject. Sprout Tutor stops at Year 10 and covers English, maths and science only.
• Any state. IXL works the same in Brisbane, Perth or Hobart. Sprout Tutor is Victorian Curriculum only, and while in beta we make no promise about other states.
• Volume. “Unlimited practice” is IXL’s pitch and it delivers it. A child who needs thirty more two-digit subtraction questions tonight will get them.
• Explanations on demand. After a wrong answer IXL shows a worked, step-by-step explanation. Sprout Tutor teaches up front with a deck and gives hints, but it does not show a full worked solution after every miss.
• Apps and games. Phone and tablet apps that save progress across devices, and over 100 games. Sprout Tutor runs in the browser.

Which one, for which family

• Outside Victoria, or Year 11 and 12: IXL. Sprout Tutor does not cover you yet.
• Victorian school child, practice at home: try Sprout Tutor first, because it is free and follows the same content descriptions as the school report. Add IXL if your child wants more volume than ten questions a topic gives them.
• Victorian homeschool: either can go in your learning plan. Sprout Tutor’s coding makes the coverage line easy to write; IXL’s breadth covers subjects we do not.
• A child who games the score: watch the dashboard of whichever you choose. On IXL, look for skills that jump to 100 in very few questions. On Sprout Tutor, check reveals, which count as wrong.

If you are unsure where your child sits before you pay for anything, our page on how to tell if your child is behind in maths is a free place to start, and how Sprout Tutor works walks through the whole loop from the parent’s side.

Create a free Sprout account to switch on the tutor and see a week of your child’s answers before you decide whether to pay for anything else.

How this page was checked

IXL prices, year coverage and the curriculum alignment statement were read from au.ixl.com/membership/family/pricing and au.ixl.com/standards/maths on 26 October 2026; the SmartScore description is from IXL’s help centre article “How does the SmartScore work?”. Sprout Tutor’s rules were read from our own code on the same day. The independent evidence on adaptive practice tools of either kind is thin, and nothing on this page is a claim that either one raises results.

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