Heddy vs Socratic by Google: a name, and a method

Socratic by Google is a good free tool for finding an explanation of something you photographed. It is not, in the method's original sense, Socratic — and that gap is the whole comparison.

No cheap point intended. Socratic is genuinely useful and it costs nothing. But the name describes a teaching method, and the method is worth being precise about.

At a glance

What Socratic does well

It's completely free with no limits, from Google, with no subscription and no metering. That's worth stating first because it's the strongest thing about it.

Its retrieval is good. Point it at a question and it identifies the topic and surfaces genuinely relevant explanations and videos rather than a page of noise. As a "what is this even called" tool, it's excellent — and not knowing the name of the thing you're stuck on is a real and common obstacle.

It covers a broad range of subjects and ages, with no UK-only or 13+ gate.

It doesn't just hand over the answer, which distinguishes it from the pure solvers. It points you at material. That's a meaningfully better default than a worked solution to your own question.

Where the name and the method part company

The Socratic method is teaching by asking the learner questions until they arrive at the answer themselves. It's not "providing a clear explanation" — it's the specific, patient, slightly maddening business of refusing to state the thing and making the student produce it.

Socratic the app retrieves. You give it a question; it gives you material. That's search-and-explain, done well. What it doesn't do is turn the question round and put the work back on you.

Which is worth naming plainly because reading a good explanation feels like learning and mostly isn't. It produces recognition — the sense that yes, that makes sense — and recognition does not survive to a closed-book exam. What survives is retrieval: having produced the answer yourself, with effort, at least once.

What Heddy does instead

You get a question back before you get help.

What are we actually being asked for here? Then a narrower one. Then the method, named. Then, at the top of the ladder — and there is nothing above it — a fully worked similar problem and now redo yours.

That's four rungs of being asked things, and the top rung still withholds your own answer, because carrying a method from a twin to your own numbers is the step that forms the memory. The full argument.

The honest cost: it takes minutes rather than seconds, it's more work, and if what you need is the name of a topic so you can go and read about it, Socratic is faster and free.

And after the question

Socratic finds material and the session ends; nothing persists.

A Heddy session ends with /cards, and the lesson becomes flashcards written by the professor who watched you get it wrong, with your specific misconception recorded on them. Weeks later, when a card still won't stick, you carry that exact card back into his room with the question already asked.

That loop — taught, tested, taught again — is what Heddy is, and no retrieval tool has a version of it.

Which to choose

Socratic if you want a free, no-account way to find out what a topic is called and read a good explanation of it — a genuinely useful thing to have on a phone, and the right tool when the obstacle is vocabulary rather than method.

Heddy if you know what the topic is and still can't do it, and want someone to make you do it rather than explain it at you.

Both is fine. Socratic to find out what you're looking at; Heddy to be walked through it and to remember it in June.

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