Short version
ChatGPT
Stay with ChatGPT if you want range
- It isn't confined to your files, so it can explain the things your slides skip.2
- Study mode asks questions and gives hints instead of answers, on every plan and model.1
- Free costs nothing and Go is $8 a month, both with ads.34
- On a Mac with a paid plan, Record mode can transcribe sessions of up to four hours.5
Skolight
Move to Skolight if it has to stick
- Every answer is built from your own lectures and readings, with a citation you can open.
- Flashcards come back on a spaced schedule instead of whenever you think to ask.
- Mock exams are timed, saved as you answer and scored with a breakdown of what to revise.
- Each course has its own space, so its decks, exams and plan are waiting when you come back.
What a generalist does well, and where it slips
ChatGPT's strength is range. Ask it to explain entropy three different ways, check a proof or gloss a passage of Latin, and it will have a go, drawing on far more than whatever you uploaded. Its Study mode turns that range into tutoring: it asks you questions, offers hints and checks your understanding rather than handing over the answer.1 OpenAI has also added flashcards you flip and mark known or missed, and quizzes built from notes you upload.26
The trade-off comes from the same place. Because it isn't held to your files, an answer can be right in general and still wrong for your course: a different notation, a definition your lecturer framed another way, a topic your syllabus leaves out. OpenAI's own help pages say its flashcards can contain mistakes and suggest checking them against your notes.2 Study mode is also easy to step out of; students can switch it off at any point, so the discipline stays with you.7
The other gap is memory across weeks. Its docs describe marking cards known or missed and setting a scheduled task to practice a deck, but not spaced-repetition scheduling.2 There's no timed exam mode in its docs either.1 You can rebuild both by hand with good prompts and a calendar - the section further down shows how - but you're the one keeping that system running.
Three weeks before a statistics midterm
In ChatGPT
Upload the lecture slides and turn on Study mode to work through confidence intervals one question at a time.1
Ask for a flashcard deck on the definitions, marking each card known or missed as you go.2
Set up a scheduled task to practice the deck, and decide for yourself which days to come back to it.2
Before the midterm, ask for an in-chat quiz from your notes and keep your own list of what you missed.6
In Skolight
Add the six lectures to the course's space. Skolar explains confidence intervals with your lecturer's examples and cites the slide.
Generate a deck from the same lectures; the review queue shows only the cards due each day.
Make a study plan for the midterm date, sized to the time you can spare on weekdays.
A week out, sit a timed mock exam, work through the weak points it lists, then retake it.
Both routes can get you ready. The ChatGPT route depends on you remembering to return to it; the Skolight route keeps the schedule inside the course.
What you give up with Skolight
- No web search
- Skolar answers from the material you've added and nothing else. If a concept isn't in your files, you add a source for it; Skolar won't go and look it up.
- Not an all-purpose assistant
- Skolight is built for studying. Its tutor is set up to work from your course material, not to draft emails, write code or chat about whatever is on your mind.
- A tighter free allowance
- Free includes 1,500 AI words a day and 1 generation a day. ChatGPT's free tier now has unlimited text chat on a lighter model.8
- Shorter recording sessions
- Skolight records lectures in any browser with a live English transcript, up to 90 minutes a session. ChatGPT's Record mode runs longer, up to four hours, but only in its Mac app on paid plans.5
Feature by feature
| Feature | Skolight | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| AI tutor chat | Skolight Yes. Skolar answers from your material, with modes for explaining, solving and quizzing.9 | ChatGPT Yes. Study mode asks questions, gives hints and checks understanding, on every plan.1 |
| Answers cite your sources | Skolight Yes. Numbered citations that open the passage they came from. No web search.9 | ChatGPT No. Citing your files isn't in its docs; answers can go beyond them, so check against your notes.2 |
| Makes study aids from your files | Skolight Yes. PDFs (scanned too), Word, PowerPoint, text and LaTeX files, captioned YouTube videos, web pages, audio and live lectures.10 | ChatGPT Yes. Flashcards and quizzes from uploaded documents, spreadsheets and images, up to 512 MB a file.11 |
| Flashcards | Skolight Yes. Decks written from your material, graded Again, Hard, Good or Easy.12 | ChatGPT Yes. In-chat decks you flip and mark known or missed, saved to your Library.2 |
| Spaced repetition | Skolight Yes. SM-2-style scheduling. Review what's due, the whole deck, or only your misses.12 | ChatGPT No. Known or missed marking and scheduled practice; no spaced-repetition scheduling in its docs.2 |
| Quizzes | Skolight Yes. Up to 30 questions in four types, easy to hard, every answer explained.13 | ChatGPT Yes. Interactive quizzes in chat, including from your uploaded notes.6 |
| Timed mock exams | Skolight Yes. A server-kept clock that survives reloads, autosave, flagging and a written analysis.14 | ChatGPT No. No timed mock exam in its docs.1 |
| Audio / podcasts | Skolight Yes. Two-host podcasts on Pro and Max; talk to the hosts by voice on Max.15 | ChatGPT No. Voice chat, but no podcast-style audio made from your files in its docs.3 |
| Records lectures | Skolight Yes. Records in the browser with a live English transcript, up to 90 minutes a session.16 | ChatGPT Partly. Record mode transcribes up to 4 hours, only in the Mac desktop app on paid plans.5 |
| Study planning | Skolight Yes. Study plans paced to your deadline on every plan; the calendar from Starter.17 | ChatGPT No. No study planner in its docs; a College Planner for US teens was announced October 2026.6 |
| Phone and desktop apps | Skolight Partly. Works in any browser, with a layout built for phones. No native app.10 | ChatGPT Yes. iPhone and Android apps, plus Mac and Windows desktop apps on every plan.18 |
If you stay with ChatGPT, study with it like this
Plenty of students will, and it can work well. Most of what makes a study app useful can be rebuilt with a few habits.
Give it your material first. Upload the actual slides or readings before you ask anything, and tell it to answer from them. Then check its flashcards against your notes, as OpenAI suggests, because its answers can reach past what you gave it.2
Ask for questions, not explanations. Turn on Study mode and ask it to quiz you one question at a time, holding back the answer until you've tried.1 Answering from memory is what builds memory; reading a good explanation mostly builds familiarity. Active recall vs re-reading covers the research.
Do the spacing yourself. Revisit each deck a day after you make it, then three days later, then a week after that, widening the gap whenever a card feels easy. A scheduled task can nudge you to start the session.2 The spaced repetition guide has the reasoning and a schedule you can copy.
Keep a list of misses. Write down every question you get wrong, in your own words. That list is the best revision plan you'll have in the final week, and it's the one thing a long chat history won't keep tidy for you.
Check the account settings. On the Free plan your chats are used to train OpenAI's models unless you opt out in its data controls.3 If you're pasting in unpublished course material, decide on that before you start.
Cost
ChatGPT3
Free: Study mode and unlimited text chat on a lighter model, with ads and limits on uploads, images and voice.
Go4
$8 a month
More uploads and image generation than Free and longer memory, still with ads.
Plus19
$20 a month
No ads, the larger GPT-6 Sol model and higher limits.
OpenAI's pricing page couldn't be read when we checked, so these US prices come from dated press reports. Free and Go show ads; Plus and up don't. Go is sold in every country ChatGPT supports, billed in local currency in some. Pro plans run from $100 to $500 a month. Free accounts are used for model training unless you opt out.
Skolight20
Free: 1,500 AI words, 1 generation a day and 3 flashcard sets a day, 1 space and 30 minutes of lecture transcription a month. No card needed.
Starter
$7.99 a month or $59 a year · $4.92/mo yearly
15 generations a day, 10 flashcard sets a day, 3 hours of transcription a month
Pro
$12.99 a month or $89 a year · $7.42/mo yearly
25 generations a day, 50 flashcard sets a day, 8 hours of transcription a month, 1 hour of podcasts
Max
$24.99 a month or $179 a year · $14.92/mo yearly
unlimited generations, unlimited flashcard sets, 20 hours of transcription a month, 3 hours of podcasts
Yearly billing saves at least 38%. One-time top-up packs of AI words never expire.
ChatGPT's free plan is a cheap way to get an AI tutor, if you accept the ads. Go is $8 a month and Plus is $20. Skolight's paid plans start at $7.99 a month, and what you pay for is the course machinery around the tutor - the scheduled deck, the timed exams, the plan. If you'd only ever use the chat, stay with ChatGPT.