Liguastic vs ChatGPT (2026)

Take one learner, roughly B1, with a target of band 6.5 and a test in eight weeks; Monday looks very different in each tool. She reads Arabic fluently, writes English slowly, and her last practice essay came back from a friend with the note "good, but improve grammar".

With ChatGPT:

1. Monday she opens a chat, turns on study mode, and asks it to explain the difference between the present perfect and the past simple. The explanation is clear, it asks her questions back, and when she gets one wrong it explains why. This part works, and it keeps working all week.
2. Tuesday she wants to know whether she is B1 or B2 for writing. It asks her what level she thinks she is, because study mode's own guidance is to say your level in the first message. She guesses B1, and everything after that is pitched at the guess.
3. Wednesday she writes a Task 2 essay and pastes it in. A band comes back in seconds, with four criteria named and a rewritten introduction. It is a useful read. She has no way to know whether that band means the same thing as the one it gave her last week, because no rubric or scale for it appears on the OpenAI pages checked here.
4. Thursday she opens Voice and speaks a Part 2 answer for two minutes. It replies, asks a follow-up, and the conversation is good practice. It reports no pronunciation or fluency score, and nothing keeps the recording beside a number she can compare next week.
5. Friday she has learned a lot about the present perfect. Monday's mistake has not come back, because nothing brings it back unless she keeps the list herself.

With Liguastic:

1. Monday she takes the placement and gets a level per skill: grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, listening and two recorded speaking turns, each graded on its own, with any skill it could not grade named on the result screen.
2. Tuesday the plan is waiting, written from that placement and from band 6.5 in eight weeks, with one step open at a time, and it says whether the plan finishes before her test date.
3. Wednesday she hands in the Task 2 essay. It comes back with a handful of corrections, each quoting her own sentence, a score on each of four criteria in half bands, and one next focus. She records the Part 2 card and gets four bands read from the audio, with the phrases that cost her quoted back.
4. Thursday, any lesson question she has missed is back in front of her when she opens Review, and will return again after 3, 7 and 21 days; Wednesday's corrections wait in her notebook to re-read.
5. Friday she has an estimated band. She has worked on listening from the approved clip bank rather than been taught it as a course, and the estimate is ours, not a result she can submit.

ChatGPT handles the explanation, the conversation and the questions you think to ask. Liguastic measures, marks and schedules the return of the lesson questions you got wrong.

These are differences you can check, not opinions.

1. What stands behind the mark

ChatGPT: it will produce a band for any essay, against the criteria you named in the prompt. OpenAI's product, pricing, study mode, Voice, memory and accuracy pages carry no marking rubric, no band scale and no essay-marking feature, and the accuracy page tells you the model can sound confident while it is wrong and asks you to use it as a first draft, not a final source.

Liguastic: an essay comes back with up to six corrections quoting your words, a score on each of four criteria, in half bands on IELTS and as a CEFR level on General English, one next focus and a rewrite step; the method, and where it is weaker, is written out on how scoring works.

The proof: OpenAI's own page on whether ChatGPT tells the truth lists hallucination, knowledge cut-off and overconfidence among the model's limitations, and its practical tips begin: use ChatGPT as a first draft, not a final source.

2. Whether a recording is scored

ChatGPT: Voice is a spoken conversation. The Live option listens and speaks at once, Standard transcribes your speech before answering, and audio clips from Live and Advanced conversations are kept with the transcript for thirty days. No pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary or grammar score is reported anywhere in that article.

Liguastic: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary and grammar come back as bands read from the audio, with the phrases that cost you quoted; see speaking practice.

The proof: the ChatGPT Voice FAQ describes the three Voice options, the usage limits and what is stored, and reports no score for how you spoke.

3. Whether anything measures you before it teaches you

ChatGPT: study mode asks you to state your level, your topic, what you already understand and your deadline in the first message. Memory can then keep that between chats.

Liguastic: the placement returns a CEFR level per skill, names the skills it could not grade, and the plan is written from the result; see how it works.

The proof: OpenAI's study mode article sets out what to include in your first message, starting with your level, and the memory FAQ describes memory as context for personalising replies.

4. Interface language

ChatGPT: Arabic is one of the interface languages in its published list, along with fifty-eight others, and it will answer in Arabic about English.

Liguastic: the interface in Arabic and lessons, questions, cue cards and essay prompts in English.

The proof: ChatGPT's language settings article, checked 6 September 2026, lists the supported languages. Both products meet an Arabic reader where they are; the difference is what happens after the first answer.

The gap is not capability. ChatGPT can mark an essay; what it cannot show you is the rubric, the level it measured you at, or the same essay scored the same way twice.

No tool fits everyone. ChatGPT is the better choice if:

• You want to pay nothing. ChatGPT has a plan that costs nothing to use, with unlimited text chats subject to abuse guardrails, and the paid plans are upgrades rather than a gate (pricing, checked 6 September 2026). Liguastic has no free plan.
• You want something that will explain anything, at any hour. Study mode will take a photo of a worksheet, a syllabus or a textbook excerpt and work through it with you, ask you questions instead of handing over the answer, and quiz you one item at a time (using study mode in ChatGPT). Liguastic's tutor is narrower on purpose: it stays on your plan and your level.
• You want more than English. ChatGPT works in dozens of languages and its help centre lists fifty-nine interface languages. Liguastic teaches English only.
• You want to talk out loud for an hour. ChatGPT Voice will hold an unstructured conversation, on the phone, hands-free, for up to two hours in a single session, and you can interrupt it. Liguastic scores a recorded answer to a cue card; it does not hold an open conversation with you at that length.
• You want help with everything else in your life too. ChatGPT writes your covering letter, reads your tenancy agreement and explains your electricity bill. Liguastic does English, and nothing else.

But if you have to hand in an essay and a recording for a score, and want them marked on the criteria the exam uses, Liguastic is built for exactly that.

Before the verdict, the limits.

• Listening is practised from a fixed bank, not taught. It is measured at placement, and afterwards you are dealt clips a person approved, at your level: play each as often as you like, your answers are marked on our side and the script comes afterwards. There are no listening lessons, it does not move your CEFR level, and because the clips are approved rather than generated, the bank can run out.
• Nothing here is an official score. Every band is an estimate from our own grader, and there is nowhere you can submit one. No examining body has reviewed a single number. See how scoring works.
• TOEFL is not open to new learners. The IELTS course is; General English carries no band at all.

Everything the site says it never does is on the about page, at the same size as the offer.

ChatGPT and Liguastic were built for different jobs: one to answer anything anyone asks it, the other to mark what an Arabic speaker produces in English.

ChatGPT does its job extremely well, and it is better than Liguastic at several things. It explains better, in more ways, on any subject, at any hour. Study mode is a serious piece of teaching design: it asks you questions rather than handing over answers, explains in layers, works from a photo of your homework and quizzes you one item at a time, on every plan and in every model (study mode). A single Live Voice conversation can last up to two hours. It works in Arabic and dozens of other languages. ChatGPT's Free plan costs $0 a month, ChatGPT Go is $8 a month, ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month and ChatGPT Pro starts at $100 a month (pricing, checked 6 September 2026).

Its limits for this reader are narrow and specific, and they are not about capability. It will mark your essay; what it will not do is measure you first, hold a level for you, work from a rubric you can read, score your recording, or bring back the mistake you made on Monday. Its own accuracy page asks you to treat the answer as a first draft and verify what matters (does ChatGPT tell the truth?). For a band you are going to plan eight weeks of study around, that is the whole question. If you would rather a person did the marking, our comparison with Preply covers hiring one by the hour.

Liguastic marks the essay you wrote on four criteria with corrections in your own sentences, scores a recording for pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary and grammar, writes the plan from a placement, returns your lesson misses at 1, 3, 7 and 21 days, and keeps the interface in Arabic while lessons, questions, cue cards and essay prompts stay in English. General English from 15.00 JOD a month, IELTS at 80.00 JOD a month with every finished add-on included, 15% less paid yearly; a free placement check with no card, a 14-day refund on an unused first payment, cancel in two clicks, access to the end of the period paid for. See pricing and the refund terms.

The bottom line: Choose ChatGPT if you want the best explainer you can get for nothing, in your own language, on any subject. Choose Liguastic if you need the mark itself to mean something: measured first, marked on the same four criteria every time, and brought back until you stop missing it.

There is nothing to migrate. Liguastic does not import anything from ChatGPT, and it does not need to: the first thing it does is measure you.

Step 1: Take the placement. A level per skill, and the skills it could not grade are named on the result screen rather than left blank. Two turns are recorded and scored from your audio.

Step 2: Read the plan it wrote. One step open at a time, built from the placement and, if you chose IELTS, from your target band and any test date you gave. See how it works.

Step 3: Hand in the first essay and the first recording. The essay comes back with up to six corrections quoting your words, a score on each of four criteria, in half bands on IELTS and as a CEFR level on General English, and one next focus; the recording comes back with four bands read from the audio and the phrases that cost you.

Step 4: Keep ChatGPT for what it does better. Ask it to explain the grammar point your next focus names, in Arabic if that is faster, and talk to it out loud when you want an unstructured conversation to run for an hour, which is not what Liguastic's scored tasks are. Nothing syncs between the two, and nothing needs to.

The switch costs a placement and a first essay, not a data export.

The ChatGPT claims on this page were read from OpenAI's own published pages on 6 September 2026. ChatGPT changes quickly, so the plan names and prices below are stated as they appeared on that date. The Liguastic pages behind the claims here are listed after them. Nothing here is a rating we made up: Liguastic publishes no ratings, review counts or testimonials of its own, and no user reviews are quoted on this page.

OpenAI sources

• ChatGPT overview: what ChatGPT is sold as, including Chat for questions, learning and everyday help, and Voice for talking in real time. Checked 6 September 2026.
• ChatGPT pricing: the four individual plans and their monthly prices, the feature list under each, the note that the Go plan may include ads, and the per-plan feature table covering projects, scheduled tasks and custom GPTs. Checked 6 September 2026.
• Using study mode in ChatGPT: what study mode is, what it can help with, Socratic questioning, layered explanation, uploads, memory, availability across plans, and the note that graded work follows your school's AI-use policies. Checked 6 September 2026.
• ChatGPT Voice: the Live, Advanced and Standard options, transcription, the two-hour session limit, thirty-day clip retention, the language setting. Checked 6 September 2026.
• Memory FAQ: what memory remembers, the memory summary, editing and deleting memories, temporary chats. Checked 6 September 2026.
• Does ChatGPT tell the truth?: hallucination, knowledge cut-off, confidence is not reliability, and the advice to use ChatGPT as a first draft, not a final source. Checked 6 September 2026.
• What is ChatGPT?: the general FAQ, including the line that outputs may be inaccurate, untruthful and otherwise misleading at times. Checked 6 September 2026.
• How to change your language setting in ChatGPT: the list of supported interface languages, Arabic among them, and automatic detection of your browser or device language. Checked 6 September 2026.
• Canceling your ChatGPT subscription and How do I request a refund for my ChatGPT subscription?: where you cancel depending on where you bought it, that cancelling stops future renewals without refunding past charges, that paid features stay available to the end of the current billing period, and the fourteen-day window for accidental purchases. Checked 6 September 2026.

What we could not check

None of the pages listed above carries a marking rubric, a band scale or any exam-scoring documentation for ChatGPT, so this page makes no claim about how consistent its bands are between two sessions. It says only what those pages contain, and what they do not.

Liguastic sources

• How scoring works: what is measured, what is not, and where the method is weaker
• IELTS preparation and General English: what each course contains
• Pricing and refunds and cancellation
• About: the six things the site never does

Method

1. Read OpenAI's own product and help pages, not third-party summaries or news coverage.
2. State plan names and prices as they appeared on the day, because they change.
3. Where a feature is absent, say which pages were checked rather than asserting it can never be done.
4. Check every claim about Liguastic against the product itself, not only against its own pages.
5. Re-check prices on every refresh and bump dateModified.

If anything here is wrong or out of date, write to hello@liguastic.com and we will check it and correct the page.

IELTS® and TOEFL® are registered trademarks of their respective owners. Liguastic is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.