Heddy vs Photomath: the answer in four seconds, or the method

Photomath will photograph your maths question and show you a complete worked solution in about four seconds. Heddy will not do that, at any price, ever. Everything worth saying about this comparison follows from that one sentence.

At a glance

What Photomath does better, and it's not close

It is the best in the world at what it does. Point a camera at a printed equation and get a clean, correct, step-by-step solution. The recognition is remarkable, it handles handwriting, and the steps are laid out better than most textbooks manage.

It's genuinely useful for checking. You've done twelve questions, you're unsure about number nine, and you want to know whether your method or your arithmetic went wrong. Photomath answers that in seconds and Heddy takes minutes.

It works offline, on any maths, at any level. No account, no subject limits, no UK-only floor.

If your honest need tonight is finish the homework, Photomath will serve you better than we will, and pretending otherwise would just be marketing.

The problem with being that good

Here is the thing that makes this comparison worth writing.

A worked solution to your problem removes the only step that produces learning. When you read Photomath's answer, three things happen for you that you needed to do yourself: recognising the problem's shape, choosing the method, and carrying it out. You watch someone else do all three, feel the satisfying click of understanding, and retain almost none of it — because recognition feels exactly like knowledge and isn't.

You find out in the exam hall, where there is no camera.

This is not a moral point about cheating. It's a mechanical one. The struggle is the mechanism, and a tool that reliably removes the struggle reliably removes the learning, whatever the student's intentions were.

What Heddy does instead

Four rungs, and the top one is the interesting bit.

Rung one asks what you're actually being asked for. Rung two narrows it. Rung three names the method. Rung four — the top, and there is nothing above it — works a fully solved similar problem, different numbers, same shape, every line shown. Then: now redo yours.

That gap is deliberate and it's the entire product. You still have to see that they're the same shape, map the method onto your numbers, and execute without a line to copy. Those three acts are the learning, and no worked solution to your own question can contain them. The full explanation.

And the refusal isn't a personality setting a determined teenager can argue past. The function that reveals a hint takes no level argument — there is no fifth rung to request, because none exists.

The honest use of both

I'd rather say this than pretend one app should exist:

Use Photomath to check work you've already attempted. Reading a solution after a real attempt, specifically to locate your error, is legitimate revision and quite efficient.

Don't use it to produce work. Twelve copied answers is a mark you didn't earn and a gap nobody will notice until an assessment.

Use Heddy when you're stuck rather than unsure. Stuck means you don't have the method, and a solution won't give it to you — a hint ladder will. That's a different tool for a different failure.

One more difference

Photomath solves the problem and the encounter ends. Heddy's sessions turn into flashcards written by the professor who watched you get it wrong — and when one of those cards keeps beating you in March, you can carry it back to him.

That's the real difference in one line: one app is about tonight, the other is about June.

Comparison written 10 Sep 2026 from each product's public description. Features and pricing change — check the current App Store listing before deciding. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.