Preply or Zoom for English teachers

Anyone starting out teaching private English lessons online eventually runs into the same question. Preply or Zoom. The two tools solve different parts of your operation, but the way each one solves them completely changes the kind of teacher you will be a year from now. It is worth understanding exactly what each one does, what each one does not do, and why so many people end up using both at the same time.

Preply and Zoom are not the same category

The first bit of confusion that comes up when comparing Preply and Zoom is treating them as direct competitors. They are not. Preply is a marketplace for language lessons. Zoom is a video conferencing tool. They solve different things, and the choice between one and the other depends far less on price and far more on who brings you the student.

Preply brings the student to you. Zoom does not. Zoom only turns on the camera once the student already exists and has already booked a time. That difference explains pretty much everything that comes after.

What Preply does for the English teacher

Preply works like a storefront. The student lands on the site and filters by language, hourly price, availability, teacher nationality, accent, specialty. They find you in that list. They book a trial lesson, like it, and become a recurring student.

The good part is that you do not have to do any marketing. The catalog is right there. The flow of new students is steady, especially during peak hours like early morning and late afternoon.

The hard part shows up in three places. First, the commission. Preply takes a high cut of every lesson, especially on the first ones with each student. Second, the catalog rules forbid you from taking the student outside the platform. Booking a lesson directly through your own payment method, sending a Zoom link in the chat, and teaching off-platform is a terms violation and can get your account suspended. Third, the student is not exactly yours. If the platform decides to penalize you for any reason, you lose access to your entire base all at once.

In short, Preply is an acquisition channel. It is not where a mature private-lesson operation sustains itself.

What Zoom does for the English teacher

Zoom does one thing, and it does it well. It turns on camera, microphone, and screen. It works on any device the student has, it is stable on poor internet, and everyone already knows how to use it.

The good part is control. On Zoom the student is yours, the price is yours, the payment channel is yours, the brand is yours, the relationship is yours. Nobody can pull you offline. Nobody charges a commission on what you agreed with the student.

The hard part is everything Zoom does not do. Zoom has no built-in scheduling. You have to set up Calendly on the side, or book everything by hand over WhatsApp. Zoom has no package control. How many lessons the student still has left this month, how many they have already used, when the renewal date is, all of that turns into a spreadsheet. Zoom has no organized recordings in one place the student can access later. It records an MP4, saves it to your local folder, and from there it is your problem to share it. Zoom has no lead generation. New students come only from your own Instagram, referrals, or your own ads.

People who use Zoom end up building the rest of the operation around it. Zoom plus Calendly plus Google Drive plus WhatsApp plus a spreadsheet. It works, but it becomes five logins, five places to check, and the student notices they are being served by a patchwork.

When each one makes sense

It is worth separating two typical situations for online English teachers.

A teacher starting from scratch, with no student base of their own, no large Instagram following, no referrals happening yet. For that scenario, Preply makes sense as an entry point. You accept the high commission as a cost of acquisition while you build up clientele. There is no way around that phase unless you already have an audience.

A teacher with their own students, coming from referrals, from Instagram, from a former student who came back, from a career fair. For that scenario, Zoom makes more sense than Preply. Zoom does not charge you a commission and does not hide the student from you. The price is whatever you agree with the student. The relationship is direct.

Most teachers sit in a gray zone between the two scenarios. Part of the schedule comes from Preply, part comes from their own students. That is where the problem begins.

Why so many people end up using both at the same time

The practical workaround that comes up often is odd but common. Source on Preply, teach on Zoom. The student arrives through the catalog, takes the first lesson inside Preply, and at some point moves to Zoom directly with payment on the side.

It works until it does not. There are two real problems with that arrangement. The first is regulatory. Moving a student from Preply to your own Zoom violates the contract, and suspended accounts lose all their history and turn the base upside down. The second is operational. You end up with two different scheduling systems, two billing systems, two ways for the student to access the lesson. The student feels it too, even without fully understanding what is going on.

People who try to combine Preply and Zoom this way usually spend a year inside that improvisation and at some point decide to professionalize the part outside the marketplace.

What both are missing once the student is already yours

For a student who is already yours, neither one solves the full operation.

Preply does not fit because it charges a commission on something it does not source. It makes no sense to pay a marketplace cut to serve a student who came from your own Instagram. On top of that, the rule against teaching off-platform makes partial use complicated.

Zoom does not fit because it is just "being on a call." All the other pieces are missing. Scheduling, packages, control over who is up to date, recordings the student can access later, your own brand, your own visual identity. Zoom hands you the video and gives everything else back for you to handle by hand.

For a student who is yours, what is missing is the opposite of Preply and more than Zoom. What is missing is a decent live class, with your brand, with scheduling in the same place, with automatic package control, and with the post-class material in the student's dashboard so they can review it whenever they want.

How Noladi handles this part

Noladi was built to cover exactly the part of the operation that Preply does not serve and Zoom does not cover.

The live class opens in the browser, at your own address yourname.noladi.app, with your brand. It runs without installing anything, with a collaborative whiteboard, screen sharing, and PDFs dragged straight onto the board. The student joins by clicking a link from their own schedule, not some random WhatsApp link.

The schedule is integrated. You set up the packages you offer, define how many lessons each one includes, and the student's credit is deducted automatically when they book. When the balance hits zero, they renew. You keep track of who is up to date and who is about to run out of their package without opening a spreadsheet.

After the lesson, the student's dashboard shows the full class to review, with a transcription of the conversation, new vocabulary sorted by level, and speaking stats. This material is what keeps the private student paying for private lessons instead of switching to one-off catalog lessons the following month.

Billing keeps happening through the method you already use, your own card or local payment processor under your own account. Noladi handles the control, not the card reader. And no commission is charged on what you agree with the student. The plan is monthly, starting at R$ 39.90/month.

Get to know Noladi

If you are still only acquiring new students, Preply does its job. If the lesson itself is what needs to work well, and the student is already yours, it is worth taking a look at Noladi as the place where the private side of your operation lives. You can create a free account at noladi.app/teacher and try the live class with the first hour on the house.