Physics & Maths Tutor (PMT) vs Seneca: A full comparison for GCSE and A-Level students

Physics & Maths Tutor (PMT) (PMT) and Seneca are two of the most-used free revision platforms in the UK, but they take very different approaches. PMT is a big, ad-supported library of PDF revision notes, past papers and topic questions. Seneca is a gamified, interactive quiz platform built around short concept blocks and auto-marked recall. Here's how they compare and which one tends to fit which kind of student.

Physics & Maths Tutor is a UK revision website that hosts thousands of PDF and HTML resources across 9 subjects: Maths, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Geography, English, Psychology and Computer Science. It covers GCSE, IGCSE and A-Level across AQA, Edexcel, OCR, CAIE and other boards. The core library is free and ad-supported, with paid revision courses, admissions-test prep and 1-to-1 tuition from £20 / hour as optional add-ons.

The site has been running since 2013 and is a default reference for many UK students and teachers. Its strengths are breadth of board-specific past papers, topic-organised exam questions, mark schemes, worksheets and solution banks. It ranks well on Google, so if you search a specific topic or paper you'll often land straight on a PMT PDF. There are no video lessons, no flashcards, no spaced-repetition system and no accounts, so it isn't designed to teach you a topic from scratch or track your progress.

Seneca is a free, gamified online revision platform used by around 14 million students and roughly 96% of UK secondary schools. It's built around short interactive courses: bite-sized concept blocks paired with auto-marked recall questions, HyperFlashcards, AI-marked long-form questions, mini mocks and cram mode. Its AI tutor, Amelia, sits inside a paid Premium tier. Free coverage spans KS2, 11+, KS3, GCSE, iGCSE, A-Level, IB and BTEC across more than 20 subjects.

The free tier is genuinely large: 600+ exam-board-specific courses at no cost. Seneca leans on cognitive-science ideas like retrieval practice and spacing, and school dashboards give teachers auto-marking and class-level reporting. There's a Premium tier with add-ons like the Seneca Guarantee at £5.99 / month. There isn't much video content, and some subjects (A-Level History has been flagged, for example) are thinner than others.

A feature-by-feature summary of how the two platforms compare.

Honestly, the best move is to find what works for you, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

What's great is that both are free at their core. PMT is a free ad-supported reference library. Seneca is free at its core with Premium tiers on top.

Broadly, PMT suits students building their own revision routine around past papers and topic questions. Seneca suits students who want a gamified daily habit with adaptive quizzes and structured lessons. If you want video teaching plus notes plus AI-marked practice in one place, Cognito is worth adding to the shortlist.

Cognito is designed to be an all-in-one platform that supports you from learning the content, to remembering it, to knowing how to apply it in your exams. So when you sign up, you can add all of your subjects to your dashboard, ready to go, as you can see below.

Each subject is broken down into sections and subtopics, all mapped precisely to your specification. That means you only ever learn what you actually need to know for your paper, and you can see at a glance what's left to cover.

Each topic has a short video lesson and/or beautifully designed revision notes, and some have a little cheat sheet that summarises everything on one page. It's good for last-minute revision, or printing out and sticking on the wall.

Once you've learned a topic, you can build your own quiz mixing any set of topics you've covered. Cognito uses spaced repetition and interleaving to decide what to bring back and when, adapting to how you're doing. These are the two study techniques with the strongest evidence base in cognitive science.

And when you're ready for exam-style practice, you can work through real exam questions with typed answers. Then either self-mark against the mark scheme point by point, or use AI marking to check your answer against the examiner's points.