Being a student is hard work. Class notes, assignments, presentations, exams, group projects and, on top of it all, a limited budget. You don't have the budget to pay for expensive software, but you need digital tools. The good news is that the free plans of most professional-level tools are more than enough for students.
We put this post together with my younger sibling, a university student, and three of their friends. They actually tried every tool and used it in their daily lives. Here are the best free digital tools through a student's eyes.
Note-Taking and Organization
Notion's free plan is incredibly generous for students. Unlimited pages, databases and sharing. My sibling keeps all their class notes in Notion. Each course has its own page, containing weekly notes, assignment calendars and exam prep notes.
Notion's template gallery is a gold mine for students. There are ready-made templates like class schedules, reading lists and note-taking systems. You can start using them right away without the hassle of building from scratch.
Obsidian is completely free and very strong especially for linked note-taking. Connecting a concept you learned in one class to another class deepens learning. A friend of ours who is a medical student uses Obsidian to link notes across anatomy, physiology and pathology, and finds this network very helpful when preparing for exams.
Todoist's free plan supports up to five projects and is perfect for tracking assignments. My sibling adds each course as a project and tracks assignments along with their deadlines. Thanks to the notifications, they never miss an assignment.
Presentations and Visuals
Canva's free plan is enough even for preparing professional presentations. There are hundreds of presentation templates, graphics and icons. In group presentations, everyone can work on the same file.
Gamma is a game changer for preparing presentations with AI. You paste in your notes and a professional presentation comes out in a few seconds. When a friend of ours had to prepare a presentation at the last minute, thanks to Gamma they created one in ten minutes that impressed their professor.
Excalidraw is completely free and great for drawing. We use it to draw diagrams, flowcharts and mind maps. Its hand-drawn look adds a warm touch to presentations.
Research and Learning
Perplexity's free plan is enough for daily research. For assignment research it gives results much faster than Google and shows its sources. It's very valuable for assignments that require citing sources.
Khan Academy is completely free. It has excellent lessons in subjects like math, physics, chemistry and programming. My sibling was struggling in their statistics class and fully grasped the subject with the videos on Khan Academy.
Connected Papers is free for academic research and visually shows the other works a paper is related to. It's an indispensable tool for our friends doing thesis research.
DeepL is a step ahead of Google Translate in translation quality. It gives more natural and accurate results when translating academic texts.