Heddy vs ChatGPT for homework: what a general assistant does better, and where a tutor won't budge
I build Heddy, so you should discount what follows accordingly. But the honest version of this comparison starts by admitting that ChatGPT is better than Heddy at almost everything a thirteen-year-old might want from a screen at nine o'clock on a Tuesday. The argument for a tutor is narrower than most tutoring companies pretend. It is also, I think, the argument that matters.
What a general assistant genuinely does better
Let me be specific rather than gracious in the abstract, because vague concession is just a rhetorical move.
Breadth. Heddy teaches UK Key Stage 3 across seven subjects, ages roughly 11 to 14, with GCSE planned next. That is the whole territory. A general assistant has no territory. It will help with A-level further maths, a university reading list, a Mandarin homework sheet, a coding project, a personal statement, an argument about a football transfer, and the KS3 question in between — without being told which of those it is doing. If your child's homework tonight happens to sit outside a narrow curriculum, we are simply not in the running.
Essay feedback, instantly, at any length. Paste two pages of writing in and get a reaction. That is a real capability and it is genuinely useful. A student who wants a second opinion on a history paragraph at eleven at night can have one in seconds.
Explaining something nobody has mapped. Heddy's professors teach from a map of 700 named KS3 concepts with 1,147 prerequisite links between them. That map is the reason a professor can say what must come first. It is also a fence: if a thing isn't on the map, it isn't on the map. A general assistant has no fence, and for a curious question at the edge of a syllabus that is an advantage, not a compromise.
Free, and already there. Most families already have it, on a phone they already own, with no download, no new account and no conversation about whether it's worth it. That is an enormous head start and pretending otherwise would be silly.
Voice, and languages. Talking to a screen out loud, in whatever language the household actually speaks at home, is a serious accessibility feature. For a student who reads slowly, or whose parent wants to follow along in a language the school doesn't use, it can be the difference between using a thing and not.
Any device. Phone, laptop, tablet, school computer, someone else's browser. Heddy is an iPhone app and a web app at heddy.app, and that's it.
So: for the majority of what a household asks a screen to do, the general assistant is the better tool, and it isn't close. Anyone selling you a tutor who tells you otherwise is selling.
Then what is the case for a tutor at all?
It is one sentence, and everything else in this article is a footnote to it.
A general assistant answers the prompt. A tutor keeps the learning goal.
Those two objectives coincide most of the time and diverge exactly when it matters. "Solve 3x + 7 = 22" is a prompt. It has a correct response, and a well-built assistant gives it, usually with a clear worked explanation — genuinely clearer than most textbooks. But if the student's actual state is I don't know what to do to both sides of an equation, then a correct, well-explained solution to that particular equation is the single least useful thing that could arrive on the screen. It resolves tonight and changes nothing about tomorrow.
A tutor's job in that moment is to want something the student is not currently asking for. Professor Pi doesn't answer the equation; he asks what happens to both sides if you take 7 away from each, and waits. That is not a better answer. It is a refusal to answer, in service of a goal the student hasn't stated and may actively resent.
This is also why Heddy has eight tutors rather than one clever generalist. Chemistry is not learned the way history is: Professor Curie builds the particle picture before any equation, Professor Newton makes you predict before you observe, Professor Quill will not write your paragraph because your voice is the entire point of the exercise. Mentor reads the student's week and points them at whoever is relevant. A general assistant does all seven subjects in one register, which is perfectly reasonable when the subject is incidental and a real loss when it isn't.
The part that is in the code, not in the instructions
Here is the claim I would defend hardest, and it is narrow enough to be checkable.
Any assistant can be told to behave like a tutor. Plenty do it well. But an instruction to a model is a suggestion, and a fifteen-year-old at half past ten with an unfinished sheet is a determined adversary. Ask differently. Say it's for revision. Say you already solved it and want to check. Say your teacher asked for the worked solution. Somewhere down that road, a system whose purpose is to be helpful becomes helpful, because nothing in its structure is arranged to stop it. That is not a flaw in the product — being helpful to what's asked is what a general assistant is for.
Heddy's refusal isn't an instruction. It's a ladder with four rungs, and the top rung is a fully worked similar problem, followed by "now redo yours." There is no fifth rung. The function that gives a hint takes no level argument, so there is nothing a student could pass to request one. You cannot argue a shape into existing. The most persuasive teenager in Britain gets a worked twin and their own problem still sitting there unanswered — which, unromantically, is the moment the learning happens.
The same structural approach runs through the things Heddy deliberately won't do: professors stay inside their own subject and refuse the rest, anything serious is flagged for review and the session ends so a parent can be told, and there is no in-app purchase at all, so a child cannot spend money inside the app under any circumstances. Those are all easier to promise than to build, and the only version worth anything is the built one.
What happens after the homework is finished
The other real difference is what survives the session.
With a general assistant, a homework conversation ends and is gone. You solved the thing. Nothing about tomorrow changed.
On Heddy, whatever a student missed in a session comes back as a flashcard, written by the professor who watched them make the error — not a generic card about the topic, a card about the specific way they went wrong. The cards are free forever, unlimited, no card details and no sign-up to look around, and there are six ways to be asked: flip, type, choose, say it out loud, order the steps, fill the gap. Get one wrong and a single tap carries that exact card back to the professor who owns the topic, with the question already asked.
Tutoring that produces its own revision, and revision that can call the tutor back, is the loop we're actually built around. It is not more impressive than a good explanation. It is just the part that is still there in March.
So which one, honestly
A general assistant if the homework spans subjects, sits outside KS3, needs feedback on a long piece of writing, needs to happen in another language or out loud, needs to work on a school computer, or simply needs to be free tonight. All good reasons, and most evenings are one of them.
Heddy if your child is 11 to 14, sits UK exams, and is stuck in a specific subject in a way that keeps recurring — where the problem isn't tonight's answer but the fact that the same gap will be there next week. Heddy is free to download, free forever for flashcards, and comes with 20 tutoring turns to try with Mentor and one professor; Heddy Plus is a monthly per-child plan a parent buys on aitutors.me, which opens all seven professors, removes the turn counter and adds the homework photo, where a student can photograph a question and work through it line by line.
And the honest closing note: the two are not really competing for the same job. If you want the sharper comparison, it's Heddy against the other products that also refuse to give the answer — that category is about two members wide, and the distinction between it and everything else matters more than the choice within it.
Written 23 Sep 2026 by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me. ChatGPT's features and terms change often and vary by plan and country — check OpenAI's own site rather than trusting any comparison article, including this one. Heddy is on the App Store.