Is there a Preply alternative for tutors who already have students?

Yes. Preply is a marketplace that sources new students and takes a commission. OBRI is the CRM you use for students you already have — scheduling, payment tracking, homework, and lesson notes — on a flat subscription with no per-lesson commission.

Where does Preply fall short for independent tutors?

Preply is excellent at discovery but keeps the student relationship inside the marketplace and takes a cut of every lesson. It is not designed to be your operations hub for long-term students, recurring schedules, homework workflows, or your own invoicing. That is the gap OBRI fills.

Does OBRI charge commission like Preply?

No. OBRI is a flat monthly subscription with no commission. Whatever you charge your students, you keep in full.

Can I use Preply and OBRI together?

Yes. Many tutors use Preply to find new students and OBRI to run their established students outside the marketplace, so they stop paying commission on relationships they already own.

Best Preply Alternative in 2026 — CRM Without 18–33% Commission

If you searched for "Preply alternative", you probably mean one of two very different things.

The first is "another marketplace where I can find new students". OBRI is not that, and we will not pretend otherwise. It does not generate leads.

The second is "I already have my students — many came from Preply at some point — and I need a real place to run my tutoring business outside the marketplace". That is where OBRI fits.

This article is for the second group.

The simplest way to think about it

Preply is a global tutoring marketplace, especially strong for languages. It connects independent tutors with students from anywhere in the world. It handles discovery, the trial lesson, and the first payment, and takes a commission in return.

OBRI is the operations tool for everything that happens after that first match: a recurring schedule, payment tracking, homework, lesson notes, and a portal for the student or parent.

In other words: Preply gets the student to your inbox. OBRI helps you keep your business organized once they become a regular.

A lot of experienced Preply tutors already work this way — Preply for discovery, their own CRM for long-term students. The only question is which CRM that workflow sits in.

Quick comparison

Feature	Preply	OBRI
Pricing model	Free to join, platform takes a percentage of each lesson	Free plan, then flat monthly subscription, no per-lesson fee
Marketplace vs solo workflow	Marketplace — students find you	Solo CRM — for students you already have
Scheduling	Built-in for marketplace lessons	Recurring weekly schedule with Google Calendar sync
Payments	Marketplace processes payment, deducts commission	Track payments, debts, balances; invoice your own students directly
Homework / assignments	Basic, often replaced by Google Drive and chat	Yes — assign, submit, review
Lesson notes	Limited	Yes, per student, per lesson
Multi-language UI	Multilingual, but tutor dashboard is platform-controlled	English and Ukrainian, tutor controls the workspace
Best fit	Tutors who want global lead flow from a marketplace	Tutors who want to manage students they already have

When Preply is the better choice

Be honest. If most of these are true, Preply is doing real work for you that OBRI cannot:

You teach a popular language — English, Spanish, French, German, Ukrainian as a foreign language — and demand on Preply is steady.
You are early in your career and you do not yet have a stable client base.
You are fine with the platform taking a cut of every lesson, because that cut is buying you discovery.
Most of your students come from Preply search results, not from referrals or your own brand.
You do not want to deal with invoicing, currency conversions, or payment chasing on your own.
You like that the trial lesson and onboarding happen inside a single, well-known platform.

In that situation, Preply is doing the heavy lifting. A separate CRM is not the priority yet — finding students is.

If your week is mostly trial lessons and new matches, plus a few long-term students, you can probably stay on Preply alone for now.

When OBRI is the better choice

OBRI becomes a better fit once the marketplace stops being the main bottleneck:

You have built a roster of regular students, and most are returning week after week, not brand new.
A growing share of your students come from referrals, your own social media, or your website — not from Preply search.
The commission per lesson starts to feel heavy at your volume, especially with long-term students.
You want to invoice students directly, in your own currency, without sharing a percentage of every lesson.
You want to manage students for any subject — math, programming, music, test prep — not only languages.
You want a real homework workflow and lesson notes, not a chat-based workaround.
You want a dashboard you control, with English and Ukrainian UI options.

For tutors at this stage, the marketplace becomes a side channel for new leads, and the real business runs on a CRM the tutor owns.

It is normal — and often smart — to use both at the same time. Preply for discovery, OBRI for operations. They are different shapes of product, so they do not really compete.

Key differences

A few honest differences worth understanding before you choose:

Discovery vs. delivery. Preply is built for the moment a student finds a tutor and books a trial. OBRI is built for everything that happens after the trial.
Commission vs. flat subscription. Preply earns when you teach. OBRI does not — it is a flat monthly subscription, regardless of how many lessons you run.
Marketplace rules vs. your own rules. On a marketplace, scheduling, cancellation, and payment policies are set by the platform. In your own CRM, you set them.
Homework and lesson notes. Marketplaces rarely structure these well. Tutors usually fall back on Google Drive, chat, and memory. OBRI makes them a first-class part of the workflow.
Subject scope. Preply leans heavily on languages. OBRI works for any subject — STEM, humanities, music, test prep — because it does not care what you teach, only that you teach.

Pricing snapshot

Pricing for both products can change, so always check the official sites before you decide.

The shape of the pricing is what matters most, and the two are very different.

Preply earns from a percentage of every lesson you teach through the platform, and the percentage can be higher for newer tutors. The more you earn through Preply, the more the platform earns from you. That is reasonable when the marketplace is sending you new students. It feels less reasonable when the same student has been with you every week for a year.

OBRI works on a flat subscription. There is a free plan for up to 3 students, so you can test the workflow before paying anything. Paid plans start low for solo tutors. Pricing is available in UAH for Ukrainian tutors and USD for everyone else. There is no per-lesson commission. Whatever rate you charge your student, you keep.

For a tutor with 10–30 long-term students, the difference between commission and a flat subscription is usually larger than people expect.

How tutors actually use both

The pattern we see most often among experienced Preply tutors:

Use Preply to fill empty slots when you want more students.
Once a Preply student becomes a long-term regular, move the operational side into your own CRM — schedule, homework, payments, notes.
Track which students came from which channel, so you know whether the marketplace is still pulling its weight.
Slowly grow a referral base so you depend less on any single platform.

This is not anti-Preply. It is just how independent tutoring tends to mature.

If you are setting up your CRM for the first time

If you currently run students out of a notebook, a Google Sheet, or a Telegram chat, do not migrate everything in one weekend. Start small.

A few resources that help:

Best CRM for Tutors in 2026 — how to choose a CRM if you are coming from spreadsheets.
Tutor payment tracking — practical templates and reminder logic for tutors. Written in Ukrainian, but the structure works for any market.
Tutoring schedule — how to structure a recurring weekly schedule for one tutor without losing lessons in chats.
TutorBird alternative — comparison with another tutoring management platform.
Teachworks alternative — comparison with a heavier agency-style tool.

Bottom line

Preply and OBRI are not really competitors. They solve different problems.

If your main pain is "I need more students, especially internationally", OBRI will not fix that. Use Preply, or build referrals, or both.

If your main pain is "I have students and my week is chaos — payments, homework, scheduling, lesson notes — and a marketplace dashboard is not enough", that is exactly what OBRI is for.

Most tutors eventually need both: a way to find students, and a way to run them. Preply covers the first. OBRI covers the second.

Try OBRI for free — free plan, no credit card required.