Which TOEFL Prep Course Is Best for the New Adaptive Format? BestMyTest vs Magoosh vs Study.com

The Verdict in Brief

1. BestMyTest is our pick for most test-takers: 6,500+ questions modeled on official ETS TOEFL questions and true to the real exam in style, pattern, and difficulty, 50 full-length adaptive tests, a free instant AI score on every Speaking and Writing answer, detailed AI reviews and TOEFL certified teacher reviews, AI Tutor skill exercises, 200+ lessons, an unlimited free trial with no credit card, and published learner outcome data.
2. Magoosh is a solid video course built on 1,300+ retired ETS questions, with a 7-day free trial and a clear refund policy, but a smaller bank, up to 10 tests drawn from it, and human grading limited to a capped number of essays.
3. Study.com offers an ETS-partnered course with a conversational AI tutor and 3 adaptive practice tests per CEFR level, with AI-only feedback, no free trial, and two-week or monthly plans.

All three cover the new adaptive format's task types, including Build a Sentence, Write an Email, Listen and Repeat, and Take an Interview.

Three Courses, Three Approaches

Magoosh teaches through retired ETS questions and video. It licenses 1,300+ real past TOEFL items, pairs them with 100+ video lessons, and gives a video or text explanation for every question. You set your own schedule and an AI tutor is on hand to explain anything you get stuck on.

Study.com teaches through adaptive practice and an AI chat tutor. ETS named Study.com its official test prep partner in November 2025. The course opens with a diagnostic that places you at a CEFR level per section, routes you through practice at that level, and lets you ask its StudyAI tutor for strategy at any point. It offers 3 adaptive full-length tests per CEFR level, built from about 1,600 questions that Study.com's own team wrote to ETS specifications. Feedback is AI only, and there is no free trial.

BestMyTest teaches through practice, review, and skill repair. You practice from 6,500+ questions, each modeled on an official ETS TOEFL question so it feels like the real exam in style, pattern, and difficulty, or take one of 50 full-length adaptive tests. Every Speaking and Writing answer gets a free instant AI score, and any answer can go to a detailed AI review or a TOEFL certified teacher. The scoring aligns with official ETS TOEFL rubrics. The AI Tutor then turns the weakness found in that review into exercises, and you practice again. The whole loop is open during the free trial, which is unlimited: no credit card, no time limit, for as long as you want.

What Each Course Includes

Figures are each company's own, read in October 2026.

Plans and Pricing

Choose the plan length by your test date, and compare the access each price buys rather than the first number on the screen. Study.com's $39.99 covers two weeks, which works out to about $80 a month; Magoosh's $129 covers six months, or around $21.50 a month. BestMyTest's 7-day pass suits a test next week, and its one to six month plans and one and two year plans scale down in monthly cost as the term grows, with IELTS prep and BestMyLingo included on every plan. Current prices in your currency are on the BestMyTest TOEFL plans page. A single TOEFL retake costs more than any of these courses, so the course that fixes your weaknesses before test day is the one that saves money.

Practice Tests and Question Banks

The new adaptive TOEFL runs about 90 minutes, uses multistage adaptive Reading and Listening, and reports a 1 to 6 band alongside the legacy 0 to 120 score. A good practice test reproduces that experience, and you need enough of them to measure progress week after week.

• BestMyTest: 50 full-length adaptive tests built for the 90-minute format, each ending in a diagnostic score report with section bands, question-type results, and the skills to work on next. Individual question practice draws on a separate bank of 6,500+ items, so taking tests never uses up your practice questions.
• Magoosh: up to 10 full-length tests assembled from the same 1,300+ licensed questions you practice with, so each test you build uses up practice items. Magoosh recommends building two or three so the rest of the bank stays fresh.
• Study.com: 3 adaptive full-length tests per CEFR level, built from about 1,600 of its own questions, each reporting a CEFR level per section.

On question source, Magoosh's retired ETS items are a genuine advantage for familiarity. Every BestMyTest question is modeled on an official ETS TOEFL question, so it reproduces the style, pattern, and difficulty of the real exam. Study.com's team writes its questions to ETS specifications; its ETS partnership covers the course design rather than the questions themselves. The questions you meet on test day will be new in every case, which is why the practice volume and the training around the questions carry the most weight in our ranking.

Speaking and Writing Feedback

This is where the three courses separate most clearly, because it is the part of TOEFL prep that a bigger question bank cannot solve on its own.

Our TOEFL speaking review and TOEFL writing review pages show what each kind of review contains and how learners use them together.

Turning Mistakes into Skills

Most learners who plateau on the TOEFL are not short of practice. They are repeating the same error in a new question. The useful test of a course is what it does the moment you get something wrong.

Magoosh shows a video or text explanation of the right answer and the common mistakes for that question. You then move on. The AI tutor can explain the question further if you ask.

Study.com gives you an AI explanation, a chat tutor you can question, and a recommendation for which lesson to study next. The repair is a conversation and a lesson rather than a targeted exercise on the skill.

BestMyTest treats the mistake as data. A low grammar score in a Writing review opens AI Tutor exercises on the structures you misused. A missed inference question opens exercises on separating what a passage states from what it implies. A mispronounced vowel opens drills on that sound, with your recording next to the model. Then you return to practice and the next instant score tells you whether the fix held.

That loop is the reason we rank BestMyTest first. It is the only one of the three that closes the gap between "I got it wrong" and "I can now do it", and it does so for every Speaking and Writing answer you submit.

Our Learner Results

Neither Magoosh nor Study.com publishes how many of its TOEFL students improve or by how much. Magoosh offers a refund guarantee, which is a policy rather than a result, and Study.com's pages carry learner quotes from research sessions. BestMyTest publishes its figures. The TOEFL learner performance data is updated from our own records, explains how every figure is measured, and regenerates the charts below each time it is refreshed.

Among learners who received three or more reviews of their answers from our AI and teachers, 93% raised their TOEFL Writing band, by an average of 2.6 bands, and 91% raised their Speaking band, by an average of 2.2 bands.

Those figures sit on 205 095 reviewed Speaking answers and 181 664 reviewed Writing responses, from 78 777 learners who completed at least one full practice test section.

If Magoosh or Study.com publish comparable outcome data, we will add it here.

Our Pick for Each Situation

• Test in under two weeks: BestMyTest on the 7-day pass. Take an adaptive test on day one, let the diagnostic report choose your AI Tutor exercises, and use the instant AI scores on every Speaking and Writing answer until test day. Study.com's two-week plan is the other short-term option.
• Speaking or Writing is your weak section: BestMyTest. It is the only course of the three with a teacher who listens to your recording and the only one with a word-by-word pronunciation review.
• You want retired ETS questions above all else: Magoosh, the only one of the three with licensed past TOEFL items. Accept the smaller bank and the capped human grading.
• You want to try before you pay: BestMyTest, whose free trial is unlimited and needs no credit card, or Magoosh for seven days. Study.com has no free trial.
• You want practice that feels like the real test: BestMyTest. Every one of its 6,500+ questions and 50 adaptive tests is modeled on an official ETS TOEFL question, with the same style, patterns, and difficulty.
• You want to improve your English, not only your test technique: BestMyTest, for the 200+ lessons, 5,000+ vocabulary words, and skill exercises, with IELTS prep and BestMyLingo included.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Method

Competitor figures were read in October 2026 from Magoosh's plans and score guarantee pages, Study.com's pricing page and course comparison, and the ETS announcement of the Study.com partnership. BestMyTest figures are the course contents at the same date, and the learner charts are generated from our published dataset.

We sell one of the three courses, and this page says which one we think you should pick and why. Everything we say about the other two links to their own pages, and both BestMyTest and Magoosh offer free trials you can use to check the comparison for yourself; BestMyTest's has no time limit.

TOEFL is a registered trademark of ETS. BestMyTest is not affiliated with ETS, Magoosh, or Study.com.