What you can actually buy

Math fact apps for homeschool, honestly compared

Written 10 September 2026 by Daniel, who built this

There’s no single best math fact app, and a roundup that hands you a number one is guessing about a child it has never met. The right answer depends on whether your kid freezes under a timer, and on whether they’ll sit down at all without a game attached. Below are the options I checked myself, grouped by the problem you’re trying to solve. If you want one answer and you aren’t going to read the rest, use XtraMath.

If you want free and plain

XtraMath

XtraMath is a nonprofit, founded in 2009, that has been doing one thing ever since: roughly ten minutes a day of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts, adapting to what a child has and has not got yet. A free account covers home use. There’s a paid family tier for extra reports and customization at a few dollars a year, which isn’t the pricing of a company trying to grow.

The catch. It’s a timer with a face on it. The interface is plain on purpose and the pressure is the mechanism. That’s right for some kids and exactly wrong for a child who already tenses up at math, and no amount of trying again next week changes that.

Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids

Khan Academy is free, nonprofit, ad free and enormous. Khan Academy Kids is the separate app for ages two to eight, also free, also with no ads and no subscription.

The catch. Neither is a fact fluency tool. Khan teaches the concept and gives untimed practice, which builds understanding rather than recall speed, and teachers have been asking Khan to add a dedicated fluency area rather than finding one already there. If your kid understands multiplication and still counts up to reach seven times eight, Khan isn’t what fixes that.

If the timer is the problem

MathFactLab

MathFactLab was built by a fifth grade teacher around strategy rather than memorization. Number lines, ten frames, bar diagrams, fact family triangles, and the idea that a child should construct a new fact out of one they already own. It’s deliberately untimed: the per student response setting runs from two seconds up to a hundred and twenty, which is another way of saying you can turn the pressure off completely.

The catch. There’s no free family tier. The free pilots are for teachers and schools, and a family pays a modest annual subscription. It also looks like what it is, so a kid who needs a game to get started won’t be talked into this one.

Rocket Math

Rocket Math comes in two shapes. The worksheet program is a subscription to a library of printable, carefully sequenced fact sheets: the child practices aloud with a checker for two minutes, takes a one minute written test, and moves up a set once they pass. The online game runs the same sequencing on a screen with automated correction, sold per student per year and cheap for a single seat.

The catch. The worksheet program needs an adult in the chair next to them for every session. That’s the method rather than an oversight, since the point is a person catching the error in the second it happens. It’s still a daily cost in your own time.

If they won’t sit down without a game

Prodigy Math Facts

This is a separate, free product from the Prodigy role playing game most people mean when they say Prodigy. It’s a pet racing game for grades one through six and up, it measures both accuracy and response time, and it never shows the child a timer. Prodigy tells homeschool parents to sign up for a teacher account, which gives the most control over what the child gets.

The catch. It’s the same company whose flagship game drew a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission in February 2021 from a coalition of twenty two child advocacy and consumer groups, alleging that a product sold to parents and teachers as free was aggressively marketing premium memberships to the children playing it. I couldn’t find any public record of what came of that. Math Facts itself is free and I found no upsell inside it, but the role playing game shares the account and is one click away.

Boddle

Boddle is a K-6 game world covering math and some reading, free for teachers and free in a real sense for families. The free account carries the actual learning content, with no cap on how long a child can play.

The catch. What Premium sells is in game currency, exclusive items, extra surprise boxes and more daily quests, on a monthly or annual subscription. The learning is free and the cosmetics are the business, so the persuasion in this app points at your child rather than at you. Decide about that before you hand over the tablet.

SplashLearn

SplashLearn is a game wrapped around a full PreK to grade 5 math and reading curriculum, standards aligned, with worksheets and lesson plans behind it. Teachers get a free classroom account, and a child linked to a teacher's class can keep working at home for nothing.

The catch. Home use on its own is a monthly subscription after a short trial, and you’re buying a whole curriculum when what you came for was fact practice. If you already have a math spine you like, this is a large second thing standing next to it.

Monster Math

Monster Math is a phone and tablet game covering addition and subtraction, times tables to ten and division, with a story and characters laid over the top. There’s a limited free version.

The catch. The full version is an auto renewing annual subscription that starts charging at the end of a seven day trial. That’s the standard mobile pattern, and it’s the one most likely to still be billing you in eighteen months. Set the reminder on the day you start the trial.

If the sticking point is motivation rather than method

PiggyBankMath

This one is mine, so weigh the entry accordingly. It’s a web app rather than an app store app, set up on a kid’s tablet with a link from your phone, so the tablet never needs your password. It pays a kid real money for finishing a round of timed practice. You set the rate per session and a daily cap for each child, and a round is ten to twenty questions depending on age. A fact counts as mastered only after three fast correct answers on at least two different days, so a slow correct answer still earns money but teaches the app nothing, and grinding two plus two pays no better than attempting something hard. When the daily cap is reached the money stops and the practice doesn’t. You hit Mark as Paid when cash changes hands: it processes no payments and holds no money.

The catch. It’s new and it has two users, my own children. Nobody independent has checked whether the mastery rule is set at the right place, and I have no evidence beyond my own house that paying a kid to practice produces a kid who practices. It’s not a curriculum either: it drills four operations and nothing else, so it goes beside your math program rather than in place of it. And it costs you real money by design, which is a premise plenty of parents reject outright, for reasons I think are fair.

The one people still recommend that you can’t buy

Homeschool forums still bring up Timez Attack, the dungeon crawler where you fight monsters using multiplication facts. Big Brainz was acquired by Imagine Learning in 2016, the full version stopped being sold that March, and the product became Imagine Math Facts, licensed to schools and districts.

The catch. You can’t buy it. There’s no individual or homeschool license, and without a school account there’s no way to create a login. Anyone recommending it’s remembering 2014.

What I would do

If you have never run daily fact practice and you want to start on Monday, use XtraMath and see what the first two weeks look like. If your child comes away from that visibly rattled, MathFactLab is the untimed answer and worth the annual fee. If they won’t start at all, Prodigy Math Facts costs nothing and the pet races are a low pressure way in.

Mine is for a narrower case, and I should say so plainly. It settles the argument about whether the practice happened and what it was worth. It doesn’t teach math better than XtraMath does.