MyTutor is a one-to-one online tutoring marketplace. You browse tutor profiles, filter by subject, level, price and availability, book a free introductory video meeting, then pay per lesson as you go. Lessons happen in a video room with an interactive whiteboard and are recorded for playback. Tutors are largely undergraduates and recent graduates from UK universities, with some qualified teachers; MyTutor says around one in eight applicants is accepted.

Atom Home is self-study. Your child sets their subjects, exam boards and exam dates, and the platform builds a revision plan, serves practice against the topics where marks are being lost, and marks full-length papers against genuine exam-board mark schemes.

With MyTutor, the lesson is the thing. A weekly hour with a good tutor can unstick a topic faster than any amount of solo work, and the recording means it can be rewatched. But MyTutor does not provide a self-study platform, homework or practice material for the other six days — what happens between lessons is between your child and their own motivation.

Atom Home is built for those six days. There is something specific to do each time they log on, chosen by what their last papers showed, and the plan tightens as the exams get closer.

This is the real split. If your child understands the content but cannot convert it into marks, more explanation is not the bottleneck — marked practice is. If they genuinely do not understand quadratics, no amount of practice will fix that on its own, and an hour with a tutor will.

Being honest about which one it is will save you more money than any price comparison. Atom Home is built for the first problem; MyTutor is built for the second.

MyTutor tutors set their own rates. GCSE tutors are listed from £26 an hour, rising to around £90 for the most experienced. There is no subscription and no minimum commitment — you pay per lesson and can stop whenever you like. There is no free lesson, but you can have a free introductory video meeting with a tutor before booking.

At £26 an hour, one weekly lesson in a single subject comes to roughly £104 a month. Atom Home plans start at £39.99 a month for English, maths and science, with Exam Prep at £59.99 and Exam Prep Plus, including unlimited mock tests, at £69.99. Annual plans save 20%, bringing Exam Prep Plus to £55.99 a month, billed at £671.90 a year. Those figures cover every subject on the plan, not one.

A MyTutor lesson includes the tutor's time, the video room and whiteboard, and a recording afterwards. If you are unhappy with a first session, MyTutor credits your account to try someone else. More than 30 subjects are covered across GCSE and A Level.

Every Atom Home plan includes unlimited practice questions, AI marking, an AI tutor and a performance dashboard with predicted grades, topic strengths and gaps, and progress over time. Full-length mock tests are the dividing line between plans: included on Exam Prep Plus, not on the other two.

A tutor adapts in the way only a person can: reading confusion on a face, changing tack mid-sentence, noticing the thing your child was too embarrassed to ask. Nothing automated matches that. What it cannot do is adapt when the tutor is not there.

Atom Home adapts continuously but narrowly. It knows which topics your child is losing marks on across the whole specification and targets practice accordingly, every day, whether or not anyone is watching.

On MyTutor, they wait for the next lesson, or book an extra one. For a hard conceptual block that is the right answer. For a small snag on a Tuesday night, it is an expensive one.

Atom Home includes an AI tutor on every plan, with annotations, flashcards and worked explanations available at the moment they are stuck.

MyTutor tutors work through practice questions with students in the lesson, on the shared whiteboard. MyTutor's parent site does not list downloadable practice papers or a question bank to use outside lessons.

Atom Home's practice papers are full-length and built on real past-paper formats for your child's exam board, marked automatically against genuine exam-board mark schemes and reviewed by subject specialists and former examiners. On Exam Prep Plus they are unlimited.

MyTutor records every lesson and makes the recordings available to parents, which is a genuinely good safeguarding and transparency feature. Its structured progress reporting sits in the schools product rather than the parent one, so for a family booking privately the main signal is the tutor's own feedback.

Atom Home's dashboard gives a predicted grade per subject mapped to real grade boundaries, with topic-by-topic strengths and gaps and progress over time.

With tutoring, progress is measured in the tutor's judgement and in school results, which arrive late. A good tutor will tell you honestly where a child stands; the information is real, but it is qualitative and it arrives weekly at best.

Atom Home measures marks against a real mark scheme and reports a grade. If the predicted grade moves, the revision is working. If it does not, you know before the mocks rather than after them.

MyTutor's safeguarding policy states that tutors in regulated activity hold a valid enhanced DBS check, renewed every three years, and that tutors provide two forms of ID and at least two references. All lessons are recorded and available to parents. Worth noting: MyTutor's own online safety page has contained conflicting wording on DBS checks, so check the current page if that matters to you.

Atom Home is a self-study platform with no live adult contact, so the question does not arise in the same form.

A real person, in real time, who can explain the thing your child cannot get from a worked solution. For a conceptual block, a confidence collapse, or a subject where your child has quietly stopped listening in class, an hour a week with someone good is worth more than any amount of software.

It also covers subjects Atom Home does not, and works at A Level and beyond, so it grows with your child in a way a GCSE platform does not.

If your child does not understand the content, start with a tutor. If they understand it but keep losing marks — running out of time, missing the command word, dropping the last two marks on every six-marker — a tutor is an expensive way to get practice, and marked practice is what they need.

Atom Home gives that for every subject on the plan, at less than the cost of two tutor hours a month: a revision plan built around their subjects, boards and exam dates, full-length predicted papers marked against genuine exam-board mark schemes, examiner-style feedback on where marks were lost, and a predicted grade that updates as they improve, across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and iGCSE. Plenty of families run both: the platform for the daily work, a tutor for the topics that need a person.