Best Apps for Virtual Study Sessions: Beyond the Video Call

The best apps for virtual study sessions run beside the call, not instead of it. Each does one job: a whiteboard to explain on, a timer everyone sees, a quiz game to test each other, or a shared code or LaTeX editor. Excalidraw, Kahoot!, FigJam and VS Code Live Share cover those four jobs on free plans.

We make StudyDuo, a live video room for studying in silence, and it appears in the table for that part of a session only. Every other app here comes from another company. The call itself, with each tool's free time limit, is covered in how to host a virtual study session. Apps that put friends on camera together are in our comparison of apps to study with friends.

The 10 apps at a glance

Every limit below comes from the company's own pricing or help page, checked on November 13, 2026. Guests are the people you invite to your board, game or file.

Whiteboard apps for virtual study sessions

A board gives the group one surface to point at when someone says "you lost me at step three". With the first two, the people you invite draw without signing up. Miro and FigJam keep boards in an account instead.

Excalidraw

Excalidraw gives every box and arrow a rough, hand-drawn look. Start a live session, send the link, and whoever opens it draws with you; the session is end-to-end encrypted. Its limit is storage: the free version keeps one canvas, saved in your own browser. Cloud saving, comments and voice inside the board come with Excalidraw+, at $6 a month per user.

tldraw

tldraw describes itself as "free and instant collaborative whiteboarding". Since March 2025 you can sign in to keep track of your files, and the app still works without an account. The people you invite by link join as editors or viewers, and "they won't need to log in to collaborate", says tldraw's announcement.

Miro

Miro fits a group that keeps the same few boards all term. Its free plan has no cap on members, but each of them signs in to edit, and nobody without an account can change a free board. Editing by link without an account starts on the Starter plan, at $8 a month per member billed yearly. Students can apply for a free Student plan with unlimited boards and 10 team members.

FigJam

FigJam is Figma's whiteboard, and Figma calls it "100% free for students, educators and schools" once you verify your status. On Education and paid plans, an open session lets anyone with the link edit for 24 hours without a Figma account. Visitors can't comment or join the audio, though. FigJam's timer gets its own section below.

Draw it, then check it against the book

A drawing teaches more when someone makes you tie it back to the material. In a 2025 meta-analysis in Educational Psychology Review, Detlev Leutner and Johanna Biele pooled 14 studies with 1,213 learners, mostly on science topics. In each study, some students got help with a drawing-to-learn task and others drew on their own. Help in general made no difference to understanding.

One kind of help did: the kind that made students link the drawing to the text, such as explaining while drawing or comparing the drawing with a provided illustration.

The authors call 0.35 a small to medium effect; the -0.15 wasn't statistically significant. The base is small, the tests of what made the difference were exploratory, and the authors ask readers to interpret the results with caution. On a shared board, the finding turns into a four-step round:

1. One person draws a process from the chapter from memory, saying each step out loud as it goes on the board.
2. Someone pastes the textbook's figure for that process next to the drawing.
3. The group compares the two, and the drawer fixes every difference in a second color.
4. The pen passes to the next person, with the next process.

Jamboard and Microsoft Whiteboard: what changed

Google ended Jamboard: "As of October 1, 2024, you can no longer create or modify your Jams", says its help page. Old Jams now sit in Google Drive as PDFs. When it announced the shutdown, Google named FigJam, Lucidspark and Miro as the places to move Jam files. Microsoft retired the standalone Whiteboard apps for Windows, iOS and Android on October 16, 2026. With a work or school account, Whiteboard carries on in Teams and on the web.

Keep one clock for everyone

FigJam's timer is available on every Figma plan, the free one included, and a file runs one timer at a time. Anyone in the file can start, pause, add time to or stop it for everyone. When time is up, the whole group sees it shake at 00:00, even with the panel closed. The catch: you can't limit the controls to one person, so agree who presses them.

Cuckoo, a shared Pomodoro timer that other lists recommend, showed only a "service suspended by its owner" page when we checked on November 13, 2026.

For a timer no one in the group has to manage, StudyDuo's Study Hour starts at one fixed time each day. Everyone in it works through the same hour with no breaks, and a check-in at the end asks whether you got your task done.

Quiz each other live

In a quiz game, the host puts each question on a shared screen, and players answer from their own phones or laptops. That works on a video call as well as in a classroom.

What quiz games do for learning

The quizzing itself has strong support. A 2021 review in Psychological Bulletin by Chunliang Yang and four colleagues pooled 222 classroom studies with 48,478 students. Being quizzed raised achievement by a medium amount (g = 0.499). Two of the factors that changed the size of that gain are ones a group controls: corrective feedback, and how many times students were quizzed.

The game wrapped around the questions is less certain. Alf Inge Wang and Rabail Tahir reviewed 93 studies of Kahoot! in Computers & Education in 2020. They concluded it can help learning, classroom dynamics and attitudes and ease anxiety, though some studies found little or no effect.

In the studies they reviewed, students complained most about unreliable internet, stressful time pressure and the fear of losing. Teachers said that scoring by speed made some students guess without thinking. Wang is one of Kahoot!'s co-founders, so read the review as an insider's.

The pull of a game also fades. Diana Sanchez, Markus Langer and Rupinder Kaur ran a quasi-experiment with 473 university students preparing for three tests (Computers & Education, 2020). Students who practiced with gamified quizzes (a wager option, a progress bar, encouraging messages) beat those with plain quizzes on the first test. The edge was gone by the second and third tests, and stronger students gained more from the game than weaker ones.

For a quiz round, that means:

• Go over every missed question before the next one, so nobody leaves with the wrong answer.
• Keep a list of the misses and open the next session with them.
• If people start guessing to beat the clock, read the hard questions out with no timer.
• Change the game every few weeks, before the novelty wears off.

Put together, the three studies point the same way for quiz-style apps for virtual study sessions: the questions do the teaching, and the game around them helps for a while.

Kahoot!

On Kahoot!, only the host needs an account. The free Kahoot! Go plan covers quiz and true/false questions with up to four answer choices; typed answers, polls and open-ended questions need a paid plan. For a study group, the player cap in the table is the limit you meet first. Paid personal plans start at $3 a month, billed yearly.

Gimkit

Gimkit calls itself a "live learning game show". Its free Basic plan offers about three game modes at a time and rotates which ones are free, says the Gimkit Pro FAQ. The other modes come with Pro, at $14.99 a month or $59.88 a year. Players join at gimkit.com/join by typing the game's code and a name.

Wayground (formerly Quizizz)

Quizizz now goes by Wayground, and it's built for classrooms: its Basic plan is "Free for every teacher, forever". Its Playground games run five minutes by default, and students can join them as guests. A teacher has to host them, though, so Wayground suits a group where one member teaches or tutors.

Work in the subject's own tool

Code and LaTeX have editors where a whole group types into the same files at once, each person with their own cursor.

VS Code Live Share

VS Code Live Share lets a group edit and debug one project in real time while each person keeps their own editor settings. The host installs the free extension and signs in with GitHub or a Microsoft account. Guests who open the link can join from a browser and stay anonymous. Its weak point is the future: Microsoft has put Live Share in maintenance mode, with no new features planned.

What pairing up on code does for students is covered in our coding study group guide.

Overleaf

Overleaf is a LaTeX editor in the browser with simultaneous editing and comments. A third writer on a free project needs a paid plan, since "adding more than one collaborator per project" is a premium feature; the Student plan allows 10. An invited collaborator signs in to accept the invite.

Pick by session type

Start from what you're studying. Two apps for virtual study sessions on top of the call are plenty, since each extra one is another link to send and another tab to watch.

• A process with steps (a metabolic pathway, a chain of historical causes): Excalidraw or tldraw, for the draw-and-compare round.
• Terms, dates and formulas before an exam: Kahoot! for a small group; Gimkit when the group is bigger and someone can host with an educator account.
• A worked problem in math or physics: a whiteboard, so the solver writes each step where the others can follow it.
• A programming assignment: VS Code Live Share, everyone in the same files.
• A lab report or thesis in LaTeX: Overleaf, if two of you write it.
• Long reading or writing, each on their own task: a silent block in StudyDuo's Focus Room.
• A board the group keeps all term: Miro or FigJam, saved to an account.

Between sessions, a group runs on other tools, from the chat to the poll for the next date: see study group apps sorted by job.

What StudyDuo covers, and what it doesn't

StudyDuo is the one entry built for the quiet part of a session. Focus Room is a video room open around the clock: people work on camera with mics off, and a line under each name says what they're doing. A visitor who hasn't signed up can look in from a browser, for up to an hour a day.

It isn't a session toolkit: there's no whiteboard, no quiz and no screen sharing, and the group rooms stay silent. Two people who need to talk can book a 1:1, which has a mic and a chat and is open to people with a verified photo. See what's inside StudyDuo's virtual study room.