AI isn’t the future for students, it’s the present.
If you are tired of wasting hours researching, organizing your notes, or writing the perfect essay, you’re in the right place. If you are a school student, or just starting your college journey, and not using AI tools, chances are that you study more slowly, don’t get good grades, or stress more.
In this post, you’ll discover the top 6 most powerful and free AI tools for students.
These aren’t gimmicks, they are tools you can use right now to work smarter, not harder. So let’s get started. 💪
AI tools have gone from curiosity to daily essentials for thousands of students. A 2024 survey by the Digital Education Council indicates that 86% of students reported using AI in their studies, with 54% using it on at least a weekly basis.
These tools can help you break down complex research, create proper citations faster than ever, and stay organized throughout the semester. In 2025, they will be more than just a convenience. They’re a key part of how you can stay ahead.
6 Top AI Tools For Students (2025)
1. Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing tool that helps you fix grammar mistakes, improve your sentence structure, and instantly make your writing clearer. While you write your essay, assignment, or email to your professor, Grammarly will automatically fix your grammar and give you real-time suggestions.
You can use it in your browser, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and your phone’s keyboard. It works in the background, so you don’t have to jump between apps. I use Grammarly every day to catch grammar mistakes in my emails before sending them, and also to write blog posts, including the one you are reading now.
This is an example of how Grammarly can help you improve your writing. As you type, it highlights suggestions for grammar, clarity, engagement, and word choice. You can accept or dismiss each suggestion with one click.
Paid Plan
If you want to take your writing to the next level, Grammarly’s paid plan offers powerful extra features. With just one click, you can rewrite full sentences, adjust your tone, and get personalized suggestions to sound more fluent and professional.
It also helps you detect plagiarism and AI-generated text, helping you stay original and avoiding trouble in school. Plus, you get access to 2,000 AI prompts to help you brainstorm and write faster.
Pricing starts at just $12/month with the annual plan, $20/month if billed quarterly, or $30/month if you prefer paying monthly. There’s a 7-day Free Trial, so you can try it for free, without worrying about paying anything upfront.
Grammarly for Education
Grammarly for Education is available through participating universities, colleges, and schools. If your institution has a license, you can get Grammarly Premium for free by signing up with your school email address.
To check if you’re eligible, use your school email address by signing up here.
If you are eligible, you can enjoy Free Grammarly Premium. If you’re not eligible, Grammarly will prompt you to use the free plan or upgrade to Premium individually.
Notion is like your all-in-one digital notebook, planner, and organizer. It helps you keep track of your notes, assignments, to-do lists, and class schedules, all in one place. You can create pages for each subject, add checklists, calendars, and embed files or links.
It’s helpful if you’re someone who likes to keep things tidy or just wants to stop losing notes across different apps. (Like me)
You can also use it for group projects, and everyone can edit the same page, leave comments, and share updates. Some people even use it for budgeting or tracking habits, but you don’t have to go that far unless you want to.
At first, it might look a bit complicated, but once you figure it out, it’s quite easy to use. You make it work the way you want.
Key Features
Notes stay organized
One of the best features about Notion is how easy it is to keep your notes tidy and in one place. Instead of having a bunch of random files or apps for different subjects, you can just create a page for each class, like “Biology,” “History,” or “Math.”
Inside each class page, you can add sub-pages for things like lecture notes, homework, past exams, or your study guides.
To-Do Lists
You can add one anywhere on a page by just typing /to-do, and it creates a checkbox you can tick off when you’re done.
You can use these for daily study goals, homework, or for your weekly plan. The checkboxes are satisfying to use, and having all your tasks in the same place as your notes means you’re less likely to forget something.
If you want to get more organized, you can also group tasks under headings like “This Week” or “Urgent,” or build a task database with due dates and filters. But honestly, even the simple version works great for everyday life.
Notion Pricing Plans – What You Get with Each
If you want more features, especially for group work or more complex setups, there are three paid plans: Plus, Business, and Enterprise. Here’s what each one includes:
⭐ Plus Plan – $10/month (per seat)
Labeled as the most popular. Ideal for small teams working together:
Everything in the Free plan
Unlimited blocks (no cap on how much content you create)
Unlimited file uploads
30-day page history
Invite up to 100 guests
Sync databases with third-party apps
Custom websites & automations
Charts and dashboards (great for visualizing info or data)
Useful if you’re doing research, managing a club, or collaborating on bigger academic projects.
🏢 Business Plan – $15/month (per seat)
Meant for growing businesses or serious team collaboration:
Everything in Plus
Private teamspaces (separate areas for different groups)
Bulk PDF export (export lots of files at once)
More advanced page analytics
90-day page history
Invite up to 250 guests
Probably more than what you need, unless you’re running a student startup or managing large events.
🏙️ Enterprise Plan – Custom pricing
For large organizations. Includes:
Everything in Business
User access controls (SCIM)
Extra security and compliance features
Audit logs and workspace analytics
Unlimited page history
Up to 250 guests
Dedicated customer success manager
Only relevant if you’re part of a big university organization, company, or doing internship-level teamwork with professionals.
🎓 Does Notion Offer a Student Discount?
Yes! Notion offers a fantastic Education Plus Plan, a completely free upgrade to the Plus Plan for students and educators. This plan is available to individuals who sign up using a valid school email address from an accredited college or university listed in the WHED (World Higher Education Database).
As a bonus, if you’re on the Education Plan, you may also be eligible for 50% off Notion AI. (Offer terms apply.)
To activate your free Education Plan, simply sign in with your school email address. Then head to Settings → Billing, scroll down, and select “Get free Education plan.”
With QuillBot, you can rephrase and rewrite text, a paragraph, a sentence, or an entire document. It’s beneficial for improving clarity, avoiding repetition, or creating multiple versions of the same idea.
Beyond paraphrasing, QuillBot includes useful features such as a built-in thesaurus, grammar correction, and a summarizer. It’s suitable for various writing purposes, including academic assignments, professional content creation, social media posts, and casual conversations.
Among all types of users, students may benefit the most from what QuillBot offers. With features like a built-in plagiarism checker, summarizer, and the all-in-one QuillBot Flow workspace, it makes academic writing more manageable. For example, you can quickly turn lengthy research into clear summaries, use the citation generator to reference your sources properly, and organize your writing more efficiently.
Let’s see an example of how the Paraphrasing Tool works:
1. Paste your text into the left box.
2. QuillBot will automatically rewrite it and show the new version on the right. You can choose different modes (like Standard, Fluency, Formal, Creative, etc.) depending on how you want the output to sound.
3. If you don’t like a word or phrase, you can hover and pick other options that QuillBot suggests.
4. Once you’re happy, you can copy the new version and use it wherever you need.
QuillBot Premium: Is It Worth It?
QuillBot Premium is the upgraded version of the free plan, designed for those who need advanced writing, paraphrasing, and editing capabilities without limitations.
At $8.33/month (billed annually), it significantly boosts productivity and content quality.
What You Get with Premium:
Unlike the free version (which limits you to 125 words), Premium lets you paraphrase entire articles, essays, or blog posts without word count restrictions.
Access to unlimitedmodes gives you better control over tone, creativity, and fluency.
You get enhanced grammar correction beyond basic spelling and punctuation fixes.
Produces content that sounds more natural and human-like.
Generate personalized summaries of your text.
Premium allows you to scan unlimitedwords for AI-generated content detection (vs. 1,200 words in the free plan).
It helps ensure your content is unique and not accidentally plagiarized.
Does QuillBot Offer a Student Discount?
Yes, QuillBot currently offers exclusive student discounts on all premium plans:
10% off the monthly plan
15% off the semi-annual (or quarterly) plan
25% off the annual plan
These discounts aren’t just for the first purchase, they’ll automatically apply to renewals as long as you remain a verified student.
How to Get the Student Discount
You’ll need a valid student email address issued by an accredited educational institution to access the student pricing. Here’s how it works:
Enter your student email address on the QuillBot student verification page.
You’ll receive a verification link via email.
Click the link to confirm your status, and you’re all set to purchase the discounted plan.
This email can be different from the one you use to log in to QuillBot. As long as your student email remains active, you’ll keep your student discount.
Elicit is a smart research assistant. Instead of using Google or online libraries, you can ask Elicit a question, and it pulls up relevant academic papers, summarizes them, and highlights the key findings for you. Cool right?
Elicit helps you find quality sources faster and understand them more easily. You don’t need to be a research expert to use it. You can type your question (like “What are the benefits of meditation?”), and it shows you studies, gives short summaries, and helps you organize your findings.
How Elicit is Different from Grammarly, Notion, and QuillBot
Let’s break it down simply:
Tool
Main Purpose
What It’s Best At
Elicit
Research assistant
Finding and summarizing academic papers
Grammarly
Writing assistant
Fixing grammar, spelling, and improving sentence flow
Notion
All-in-one workspace
Rewriting sentences, summarizing text, and improving tone
QuillBot
Paraphrasing and writing help
Rewriting sentences, summarizing text, and improving tone
Let’s see an example of how you can use Elicit to generate a structured research report.
Let’s say you’re writing an essay about the benefits of meditation. Instead of digging through Google and reading 20 articles, you go to Elicit and type this question:
”What are the benefits of daily meditation?”
Here’s what Elicit does:
Find academic papers related to your question.
Shows you a table with the study title, abstract, sample size, outcome, and key findings — all neatly organized.
Highlights what each study says about the benefits (e.g., stress reduction, improved focus, lower anxiety).
You can click to read full papers or dive deeper into any result.
What You Get with Elicit Plus ($12/month)
If you’re doing deep research regularly, like writing essays, content pieces, or academic reports, the Plus version of Elicit unlocks extra tools to make your workflow even faster and more powerful. The Plus version starts at $12 per month.
Here’s what you get:
🔁 Auto-Generate Research Reports
Instead of typing questions manually, you can let Elicit build full research reports for you automatically.
📚 Unlimited Summaries
You can summarize up to 8 papers at once with no limits. This saves a ton of time if you’re reviewing multiple sources for a single topic.
💬 Chat with Full Papers
Upload up to 8 full-text PDFs and chat with them all together. Ask questions like “What did this study find?” or “What was the sample size?” and Elicit will give answers based on the content.
📤 Export Your Research
Elicit Plus lets you export your results to files like:
CSV – spreadsheet format
RIS – for reference managers like Zotero
BIB – for LaTeX or BibTeX users
🔎 Extract Data from More Studies
You can pull structured data from up to 50 papers per month. Ideal for doing real comparisons across different sources.
➕ Add More Columns to Tables
Customize your tables by adding up to 5 extra columns at once. For example, you might want to include columns for “Sample size,” “Funding source,” or “Conclusion.”
🎯 High-Accuracy Columns
You also get 1 premium “high-accuracy” column per table, which uses better models for more reliable results when you need precision.
📊 Extract Data from Tables Inside Papers
Some papers include tables with detailed stats or results. With Elicit Plus, you can now pull data straight from those tables too, not just from the text.
💭 Is It Worth It?
If you’re doing serious research, – Yes – Elicit Plus can save you hours and help you feel more confident about your sources.
If you’ve ever wished you had someone to help you write, explain things, or brainstorm ideas, yes, you got it right, ChatGPTis that assistant.
You just type your question, task, or prompt in plain English, and it replies instantly with answers, suggestions, or even full drafts. It’s almost the same as chatting with a super helpful friend who never gets tired.
If you’re stuck on a topic, you can ask it to explain things in simple words, like “Explain photosynthesis like I’m 15,” and it breaks it down clearly. It’s also great for writing support. You can get help creating essay outlines, fixing awkward sentences, or improving grammar.
It won’t write your paper for you (and you shouldn’t use it that way), but it helps get unstuck or polish what you’ve already written. When exams are coming up, ChatGPT can help you revise by turning long notes into summaries or making flashcards you can review quickly. It can quiz you if you ask it to.
Free vs Paid ChatGPT
Is it worth paying for GPT-4, or is the free version (GPT-3.5) good enough?
If you sign up for ChatGPT and don’t pay anything, you’ll use GPT-3.5, the free version. And honestly, for most people, it’s more than enough.
That said, it does have limits. It might misunderstand your question, give short or generic answers, or lose track of longer chats. Still, if you’re just getting started with AI or only need it once in a while, the free version is a solid choice.
GPT-4 is the premium version of ChatGPT, and it’s only available if you subscribe to ChatGPT Plus for $20/month. The difference? GPT-4 is a lot smarter. It gives clearer, more accurate, and more detailed responses. It’s better at handling complicated tasks, like analyzing research, writing full blog posts, answering follow-up questions, or helping with code.
It also remembers more of your conversation, so you can go deeper without repeating yourself. With GPT-4, you also get access to extras like file uploads, image understanding (if available in your plan), and tools like browsing and plugins.
✅ Is GPT-4 Worth It?
Yes, if you:
Use it for work, school, or business
Write, code, or research regularly
Want the best version of AI available today
No, if you:
Just use it for fun or light tasks
Only need basic help once in a while
Don’t want to pay monthly
Free ChatGPT Plus for College Students (Limited-Time Offer)
Full-time and part-time students enrolled at degree-granting colleges or universities in the U.S. or Canada can claim free access to ChatGPT Plus from March 31 to May 31, 2025.
Once claimed, the offer gives you two full months of free access to the Plus plan
This is a limited-time promotion, so be sure to grab it while it’s available!
Staying organized in school can be a challenge, but Gemini makes it feel effortless. It’s a powerful workspace designed to handle everything from note-taking and project planning to research and collaboration.
With smart features that help you track deadlines, share documents, and manage tasks easily, Gemini turns cluttered chaos into clear structure.
Features of Gemini (Free)
The free version of Gemini packs quite a punch if you are looking to stay organized. You get unlimited note-taking space with easy-to-use formatting options, so your notes are always clear and well-structured. You can also create to-do lists, set reminders for important deadlines, and organize your tasks by subjects or projects.
Collaboration is another standout feature, you can share notes and work on projects with classmates in real time, making group work smoother and more efficient. Plus, everything syncs across your devices, so you’re always up-to-date, whether you’re in class, at the library, or studying from home.
Gemini stands out from the other tools we’ve reviewed by focusing heavily on seamless organization and project management, unlike Grammarly, QuillBot, and ChatGPT, which are geared towards writing, editing, and brainstorming.
While Notion also handles organization, it’s far more customizable and complex, whereas Gemini is simpler and more user-friendly.
Gemini models and features
Gemini 2.0 Flash
Gemini 2.0 Flash is built for speed and efficiency. It handles tasks like summarizing information, chatting, and extracting data with impressive speed. One of its standout features is the ability to process multiple types of content, including text, images, audio, and even video. With a massive 1-million-token context window, it can handle large chunks of data without losing track, making it perfect for big projects and in-depth study sessions.
Gemini 2.5 Flash
An upgrade from the 2.0 version, Gemini 2.5 Flash brings in smarter processing. It lets you adjust how deeply it analyzes information based on your needs. This means you can switch between quick summaries and detailed explanations depending on the complexity of your research. It’s ideal for real-time collaboration and projects that require speed and accuracy.
Gemini 2.5 Pro
This version is where things get powerful. Gemini 2.5 Pro is designed for more advanced tasks like coding, deep research, and problem-solving. It supports code execution, function calling, and system instructions, making it a great tool not only for students but also for developers. It excels in handling complex questions and delivering structured, accurate responses, perfect for high-level studies or technical projects.
Deep Research
For those who want to dig deep into a topic, Gemini’s Deep Research feature is a game-changer. It gathers information from across the web, organizes it, and presents it in a clear, well-structured report. You can even turn these reports into audio summaries, making it easy to review important information while on the go. It’s like having your personal research assistant.
Google Gemini Advanced – Free for Students Until Finals 2026
This offer is available to students 18 or older in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, or Indonesia. All you need is a valid .edu email address to verify your student status when signing up.
Be sure to act quickly, you must sign up by June 30, 2025, to take advantage of this deal.
To extend your free access for the second year, Google will ask you to re-verify your student status before the new school year begins. If you’re still eligible, you’ll keep access through finals in 2026, up to 15 months total!
To get ChatGPT as a student, sign up for a free OpenAI account and verify if you’re eligible for any student offers, like free access to ChatGPT Plus. If available, use your school email to claim the offer.
Is there a ChatGPT for studying?
Yes, ChatGPT is widely used for studying, research, and assistance with academic projects.
Is Grammarly free for students?
Grammarly offers a free version for everyone, but premium plans are paid. Some schools provide premium access for students.
Do Grammarly do student discounts?
Grammarly doesn’t offer a direct student discount but provides free Premium access if your school has a Grammarly for Education license.
Is Notion free for students?
Yes, Notion is free for students with a valid school email address.
Is Notion good for students?
Notion is excellent for students, offering tools for note-taking, project management, and organization.
Does QuillBot have a student plan?
Yes, QuillBot offers student discounts on premium plans when you verify your student status with a valid school email.
Are you allowed to use QuillBot for school?
Yes, QuillBot is allowed for school use, especially for grammar checks and paraphrasing.
Is Elicit free for students?
Elicit is currently free to use for all users, including students.
Is Gemini free for students?
Yes. This offer is available to students 18 or older in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, or Indonesia. All you need is a valid .edu email address to verify your student status when signing up.
Can students use Google Gemini?
Yes, students can use Google Gemini if it is available in their region and they have access.
