At first glance they look interchangeable. Both are Singapore-built AI tutors. Both cover P1 to JC2. Both bill monthly under S$60 with no annual lock-in. Tutorly.sg has 12,000+ users and a wall of past-year papers. LearnBuddy is newer, multimodal, and louder about Socratic teaching.
So which one actually moves your kid’s grade? The short answer: it depends on how old your child is, and whether you want to see what’s happening inside the lessons.
The Price Question
Tutorly charges S$49/month flat, all subjects, one user account. LearnBuddy starts at S$39/month Solo (one child) or S$59/month Family (up to three children). Both are monthly, both cancelable — already a different universe from Geniebook’s ~S$1,852/year per subject.
For a single P5 child, LearnBuddy Solo undercuts Tutorly by S$10/month. For a household with a P3 and a P6, Tutorly is effectively S$98 for two logins; LearnBuddy Family is S$59 for three profiles. The kiasu-parent math gets lopsided fast.
Can Your Kid Actually Use It?
This is where the products diverge.
Tutorly is a textbox. You type a question or upload a screenshot, the AI replies. That works for upper-primary students who already type a Math problem sum without sweating. It falls apart for younger kids. Forums like KiasuParents carry the same complaint repeatedly — one mother described her P3 daughter struggling so hard with typing long synthesis answers that the typing itself replaced the learning.
LearnBuddy was built around that exact gap. Voice in, voice out. A drawing canvas to scribble Math working on. Image upload for photographed assessment-book pages. For P1–P4, that’s the difference between “kid uses it daily” and “kid quietly stops opening the app in February.”
Do Parents See What’s Actually Happening?
Tutorly doesn’t ship a parent dashboard. Conversations live in the child’s chat thread — if you want to know what your son worked on Tuesday, you ask him.
LearnBuddy gives parents a concept-level view: which topics the child is stuck on, which questions she retried, weekly trend lines. That answers the question every paying parent eventually asks: is this actually working, or am I waiting until report-card day to find out?
Both sit alongside MOE’s SLS, which remains free but limited in subject coverage. Neither replaces SLS — they complement what schools already use.
Does It Teach, or Just Answer?
Tutorly’s strength is its 1,000+ past-year-paper corpus. Ask it a 2024 Nanyang Math question and you’ll get a clean worked solution. Useful for revision. Less useful when your kid needs to learn the underlying concept, because the default behaviour is to hand the answer over.
LearnBuddy leans the other way. Its tutor is prompted to ask guiding questions before showing steps — closer to how a good human tutor handles a stuck student. Recent research has flagged that answer-first AI tutoring can hurt retention, while “support, don’t replace” prompting largely avoided that effect. Pedagogy beats library size when you’re trying to prevent a dependency habit.
The Family and Mother Tongue Factor
Two practical gaps for Tutorly: one account per subscription, and Chinese handled as plain text Q&A. For an English-speaking HDB household whose biggest pain is 华文 — pinyin, character handwriting, 听写 — typing into a chatbot doesn’t simulate what the child is tested on.
LearnBuddy’s Family tier covers up to three profiles on one plan, and the multimodal stack (voice + handwriting) is the right shape for Mother Tongue practice. If you have siblings, or your weakest subject is Chinese, that’s a decisive split.
Who Should Pick Which
Pick Tutorly if your child is upper primary or secondary, types comfortably, and mainly needs a paper bank to grind through with explanations on demand.
Pick LearnBuddy if your child is P1–P4, struggles with typing, needs Chinese support that feels like school, or you have more than one kid. The S$59 Family tier ends the per-subject, per-child arithmetic that makes tuition spending so painful in the first place.
Both beat paying S$400+ a month at a centre and hoping the next report card looks different. The real question is which one your specific kid will still be using in week six.