What is Chegg? Our Complete Review

What is Chegg? Student looking at computer

What is Chegg?

Based in Santa Clara, California, Chegg is a disruptive education technology company that offers textbook rentals (digital and physical), textbooks, and a plethora of online student services. Chegg’s student services include online tutoring, online homework assistance, and scholarship and internship search engines.

Chegg’s slogan, “A Smarter Way to Student”, shows the breadth of the student services they offer. In practice, many college students also use Chegg to complete homework assignments, papers, quizzes and exams.

According to the company’s mission statement, “We support students on their journey from high school to college and into their career with tools designed to help them learn their course materials, succeed in their classes, save money on required materials, and learn the most in-demand skills.”

We’ll dive further into these specific services, but first let’s take a look at Chegg’s history and development as a company. 

It all began in 2000, when three Iowa State students got together and launched Cheggpost, a service similar to Craigslist for Iowa State students.

The name Chegg is a combination of chicken and egg. According to this New York Times article, the students were frustrated that you couldn’t get a job without experience, and couldn’t get experience out of a job.

Five years later, the company incorporated with humble beginnings, providing similar services to education blogs today, including:

  • Scholarship searches
  • Internship matching
  • College admissions advice

It wasn’t until 2007 that Chegg took a page out of the Netflix book and centered all their efforts on renting out textbooks to college students. This turned out to be a great plan, as many college students only use their textbooks during the course anyway.

Expanding to the national stage, Chegg went public in 2013, and continued to grow through partnerships with college textbook giants such as Pearson and Ingram Content Group. Most recently, Chegg partnered with Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), home to some of the best free college writing resources online.

Chegg has also bought quite a few companies, which helps explain how the education technology powerhouse has grown and evolved over the past decade.

Chegg textbook rental

Chegg History and Growth

Seeing what companies Chegg has bought gives a clearer picture of the services they offer today. By our counting, Chegg has acquired at least 9 other companies to expand their business areas throughout the past few years, including:

  • Zinch, a website offering scholarship searches and college recruiting
  • Cramster, an online company helping students with homework and exam prep
  • Notehall, a company that sold course notes
  • 3D3R, a software company acquired to launch multiple Chegg digital initiatives
  • InstaEDU, another (larger) online tutoring company
  • Internships.com, a website focused on (you guessed it) connecting students with internships
  • Imagine Easy Solutions, a company helping students with research and bibliographies
  • WriteLab, an artificial intelligence tool similar to Grammarly
  • StudyBlue, an flash card software company
  • ThinkFul, an online platform with courses in computer science

As you can see, Chegg’s services have expanded to include online tutoring, scholarship and internship search engines and resources, college writing resources such as bibliography tools, online flash cards. With the acquisition of ThinkFul, we may even see Chegg branch out into providing its own standalone educational tracks.

What Services Does Chegg Offer?

Chegg offers digital textbook rentals, physical textbook rentals, textbook purchases, and a host of online student services. These online services encompass almost everything you can think of that would help a college student with their studies:

  • Chegg Study: Answers to textbook questions and an expert question-and-answer service
  • Chegg Math Solver: A graphic calculator and step-by-step math solutions so you can understand both the answer and the process to get there
  • Chegg Writing: This service check for grammar and plagiarism, and also assists students with citations for papers
  • Chegg Practice: Practice exams for a wide variety of study areas, with detailed step-by-step explanations of each answer so that you can review

We’ll dive further into these services individually, but first let’s discuss how they provide such high-quality and on-demand answers to a vast number of college students.

How Does Chegg Work?

How does Chegg work?
According to Forbes, Chegg employs over 70,000 experts in India to answer students’ questions.

Chegg works by harnessing the most modern educational technology to help students with a broad variety of needs, from renting textbooks to writing papers to doing homework to finding internships. If there’s something students need, there’s a good chance Chegg has a service to meet that need.

In terms of how they provide the specific services, eTextbook rentals are available through the website. If you rent a physical textbook, you’ll sign in to your online Chegg account, print your prepaid UPS return label, put the books in a box, and drop it off at UPS.

Chegg’s online services are all accessed by creating an online student account. Once you have an account, you can enroll in one or multiple services, or get a bundle such as the Chegg Study Pack.

How does Chegg get answers for students? According to a scouring Forbes piece which we’ll reference again later, Chegg “employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees” in India, who are available around the clock to answer subscriber questions.

How to Rent Textbooks on Chegg

As we cover Chegg’s multitude of services, we’ll start with their roots in textbook rental. To rent digital or physical textbooks on Chegg, simply visit their website, put the name of your desired textbook into the search box, add the book to your cart, click checkout, create an account as prompted, and complete your online purchase.

As this is a rental, you must create a Chegg account to rent a book. When it’s time to return your book, you’ll need to log back into your online Chegg account, print out the UPS return label, and drop your book or books off at a UPS location near you.

The process is much the same for online rentals, and your Chegg account login will allow you to access your eTextbooks with your devices. 

Textbook rental, sales, and purchases were the services that launched Chegg’s success, so it’s no surprise that the process is fully optimized for a smooth and user-friendly interaction.

How to rent textbooks on Chegg
Chegg’s textbook rental service launched the business’ nationwide success.

What is Chegg Study?

Chegg Study is a subscription service providing online homework help for students. Chegg Study provides step-by-step answers to questions found in textbooks, and also allows subscribers to submit their own questions to experts. These experts provide detailed answers within 15 minutes to 24 hours.

Chegg Study is at the core of Chegg’s success and it’s controversy over the past years, as we’ll get to in the later sections on cheating accusations. While Chegg Study can be used simply to understand the problems, its use to answer homework questions is against many colleges’ codes of conduct.

The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the drama, as students taking quizzes and exams online have also been able to access Chegg Study answers, making a marked improvement in their grades. 

We’ll cover this drama more in a later section, but we wanted to mention this debate now because it shows something: Chegg Study is incredibly effective. If the Chegg study answers weren’t comprehensive, fast, and accurate, then universities wouldn’t be up in arms about its use.

We’re not commenting either way on the ethics yet, just the quality, and Chegg Study offers incredible quality. With a vast database of textbook answers, answers to other students’ questions, and quick answers to new questions, Chegg Study is disrupting the entire landscape of higher education.

Let’s check out a couple of quotes from a Reddit thread before we move on. According to u/pzezson, Chegg is “100% worth it” because they have answers to almost every textbook question out there, as well as answers for specific assignments.

Reddit user u/Fishskull3 shares an answer for those in more technical majors. “Personally in an engineering discipline it’s extremely helpful because it can walk through how to solve very difficult [homework] problems and class problems, and often help you see first hand how to use concepts you don’t fully understand. If you’re also in a class where a professor always gives more hw than necessary it can really save you a lot of time if you don’t need to solve every single problem to ‘get it’.”

Fishskull3 goes on to argue against Chegg Study’s detractors, noting that Chegg Study is “an excellent tool and most people that think that it is a crutch, or not worth it, either don’t have many difficult classes or lack the self discipline to not just mindlessly copy every single [homework] problem down without ever looking back, then curse it for ruining their grade.”

Chegg Study is at the core of Chegg’s growing revenue and growing controversy. When people discuss Chegg or “chegging”, they’re most commonly referring to the answers on Chegg Study.

What is Chegg Math Solver?

What is Chegg Math Solver?

Chegg Math Solver is much more than a powerful graphing calculator. The Math Solver can take you photo and spit out the math equation within seconds, showing you how each step was completed!

According to Chegg, the free version of the Math Solver (limited to three problems per day) gives you the solution and a basic explanation. The paid version includes unlimited problems, detailed explanations with sub-steps for each problem, and a graphic calculator.

The Math Solver is capable of handling almost any math problem, including those found in:

  • Pre Algebra including powers, roots, and linear equations
  • Algebra including polynomials, quadratic expressions, and quadratic equations
  • Pre Calculus including matrixes and logarithmic functions
  • Calculus including general and fundamental derivatives
  • Linear Algebra including determinants, matrix operations, and eigenvalues

While Chegg Math Solver has seen some level of success, it’s still definitely a background player compared to the comprehensive and personal answers found on Chegg Study.

What is Chegg Writing?

Chegg Writing is an advanced AI software to proofread, improve grammar, scan for plagiarism, and create instant citations. Chegg Writing also includes a person expert review of your paper.

The Chegg website boasts that this AI has put in some serious work with:

  • 7+ million assignments checked
  • 4+ million plagiarism scans
  • 15+ million grammar errors caught
  • 1.7 billion citations generated

If you haven’t heard of Chegg Writing, then Grammarly is the best comparison, and the two services compete for subscriptions.

Chegg Writing’s plagiarism checker is arguably the most advanced on the market. If Chegg finds plagiarism in your paper, it will help you to either remove it or to cite the source accurately.

Chegg Writing’s plagiarism checker is actually quite similar to Turnitin, which is used by many universities to check papers for plagiarism. You guessed it, this similarity between Chegg Writing and Turnitin has also led to more drama and cheating accusations, as Chegg allows students to see whether their paper will likely be flagged by the university’s software or not. Whew!

If you do ask for an expert review of your paper, Chegg will get back with your review within 24 hours.

While Chegg lacks some of Grammarly’s most impressive features such as its tonality check, it’s still more than capable for college coursework. Being specifically designed for college students, it ticks all the right boxes. Perhaps too many boxes, according to the plagiarism whistleblowers. 

What is the Chegg Study Pack?

What is Chegg Study Pack?

The Chegg Study Pack is a subscription that bundles Chegg’s core student services: Chegg Study, Chegg Math Solver, and Chegg Writing. These resources include homework solutions, video walkthroughs, expert Q&A, plagiarism and grammar checks, practice sets, and the Chegg Math Solver.

The study bundle claims to enable students to “learn anything, anytime”. The Chegg website describes it this way: 

“From core classes to tough upper levels, Chegg Study Pack has tools to help you crush the class. Get a better understanding of complex problems, so you can finish homework faster and get better grades.”

In essence, the Chegg Study Pack just gives you access to all of their core online student success resources for a discounted monthly subscription.

How Much Does Chegg Cost? Is Chegg Free?

Unfortunately no, Chegg is not free. However, Chegg does offer 5 free Chegg Practice questions per month, 3 Chegg Math Solver solutions per day, and a 3-day trial of Chegg Writing.

For their core online offerings, Chegg charges by monthly subscription fees. These core offerings are Chegg Study, Chegg Math Solver, and Chegg Writing. You can also bundle these services to save money with the Chegg Study Pack.

If you subscribe to these services individually, the prices are:

  • $14.95 a month for Chegg Study
  • $9.95 a month for Chegg Math Solver
  • $9.95 a month for Chegg Writing

The bundled price is thankfully much lower, coming in at $19.95 a month for the Chegg Study Pack.

There’s no way to buy these services outright, so you’re stuck with the monthly bill, unless you’re one of those nefarious students looking to unblur Chegg answers (we’ll cover that later).

What is Chegg Uversity?

What is Uversity?

According to the official press release on BusinessWire in June of 2021, Uversity is “a platform for educators and faculty to share their education content with millions of learners on Chegg to help support their studies and enhance learner outcomes. The content will augment and enhance Chegg’s existing Chegg Study service that already contains 59 million step-by-step solutions.”

In short, Uversity will allow for professors to share videos and other more in-depth content students, rather than the straightforward question-and-answer format that is available now.

How will this work practically? The news release states that, “Educators will be compensated for their content contributions and will retain ownership of their intellectual property rights and give Chegg certain limited exclusive licenses.”

From this it sounds like professors will still be able to create content for their universities and other platforms, but will get paid to give Chegg exclusive access to their video and related course content.

To see how professors feel about this, we checked in on r/Professors, where the profs weighed in on the press release.

“In the long term, what such companies want is to set up a parallel education economy where obtaining degrees will not be possible without using their services,” said a skeptical u/seidenkaufman.

Others were less gentle. “PAY ME, Chegg, and maybe I’ll give you some old (vulgarity)”, wrote salty professor u/larry_birb. 

User OphidiaSnaketongue concurred, saying, “I would rather eat live worms than support those parasites.” Okay, so there’s no live lost between Chegg and the professors apparently. Let’s move on.

It’s unclear whether this will be part of Chegg’s subscription offerings, or more similar to the massive open online course (MOOC) providers such as Coursera and edX.

For now, Uversity remains in the preparation stage, as Chegg recruits faculty to create content for its new service. We’ll have to wait and see how it shakes out for students!

How Many Devices Does Chegg Allow?

How many devices does Chegg allow?

You may only use two devices, and you can only swap to a new device once every 30 days.

According to Reddit user u/ginginpowpow, “Chegg is very anal about keeping track of how many devices are being used for one account. [I’m] constantly asked to change my password because I log in on library computers and it doesn’t recognize them as the same device.”

As you can guess, this two-device limit is intended to prevent students from sharing Chegg membership logins with their friends, so be prepared for strict enforcement of the two-device policy.

It sounds like asking users to change their password is another method to prevent the sharing of Chegg accounts.

Is Chegg a Legit Site?

Chegg is a legit site in terms of being a reputable, publicly-owned American company which offers proven resources. Chegg is less than legit in that you wouldn’t want any professor to know that you use Chegg, and it will be considered cheating by the vast majority of faculty and universities, even if you personally don’t use it to cheat.

The word legit can have a range of connotations, so the answer is either a strong yes or a strong no depending on your perspective. On the one hand, Chegg is never going to steal your credit card information and sell it on the dark web. They’re a huge public company based in California, and as such have a high level of accountability.

Chegg has a strong interest in protecting their excellent reputation with college students, so their customer service and products will remain top-notch.

With all that said, some detractors claim that Chegg’s subscription services are actually illegal in many America states, which we’ll get to later. It’s also undeniable that many Chegg subscribers use the services to cheat.

Is Chegg Cheating?

Yes, Chegg is cheating. Using Chegg Study to answer homework questions, quiz questions, or exam questions is almost universally considered to be cheating. Universities and faculty frown heavily on student Chegg usage, and may discipline students for breaking the university code of conduct. 

It is possible to use Chegg for personal use outside of coursework, which is not cheating.

The Forbes piece we mentioned earlier interviewed 52 students who use Chegg, and apart from the students Chegg had provided for the interviews, all but four students admitted they use Chegg Study to cheat.

These students cited a variety of reasons for using Chegg to cheat, like struggling to get through homework at midnight, or simply not knowing how to solve a quiz problem.

Also, there’s always that wise guy who asks if renting Chegg textbooks is cheating. Don’t be that guy. We’re not even going to answer.

What is Chegg? Is Chegg cheating?

Do Professors Check Chegg?

Yes, many professors check Chegg, though not all do. Professors can check Chegg by Googling the problem, as Chegg answers may have slight variations from other correct answers. Professors may also notice when students ace homework but fail tests.

To illustrate, let’s recap a story that u/Mwxh shared on the ProRevenge subreddit. Mwxh had an engineering course with an older prof who didn’t seem too technologically savvy.

An upstanding student, Mwxh felt irritated that half of his classmates had to use the bathroom “for totally unknown reasons” during his engineering final. 

Still, Mwxh did fine on the exam except for one question that totally stumped him. Later, professor sent out an email “explaining his diabolical plan to catch cheaters”.

The professor had designed a question that was impossible to solve and gotten his TA to post the question on Chegg. The professor then created his own Chegg account and submitted a flawed answer for that question!

About a dozen students had submitted this flawed answer. The professor emailed the names of the 14 cheaters to all the department professors, gave them all a 0 on the exam, and reported them for breaking the university’s academic honor pledge.

As this example shows, at least some professors do check Chegg, and there are several ways they can find that students are using Chegg to cheat:

  • One obvious sign is when students ace the homework but fail quizzes or exams.
  • In more technical majors, using advanced procedures that haven’t been taught in the class can be a giveaway, especially if students can’t replicate or explain that work themselves.
  • If the problem-solving method or notation is significantly different than what is taught in class, professors may wonder where students learned this and investigate further.
  • Finally, if many students submit answers phrased the same way, it’s easy for professors to plug those answers into Google and find Chegg showing up as the top result.
Do professors check Chegg?
Cheating with Chegg can draw the ire of professors.

Does Chegg Notify Your School?

According to Chegg’s strict privacy policy, they will not release student information on used their service or viewed a particular page. However, Chegg may be allowed to give student information to a college as part of an official academic dishonesty investigation.

So no, Chegg isn’t composing thousands of emails ratting out students to their colleges. If a student is already under suspicion or investigation however, it’s very possible that Chegg would divulge some level of information to a college or university.

When considering this question, it’s helpful to think of Chegg’s interests. On the one hand, they would be shooting their own foot as a business by telling colleges about cheating students. This would lead to their entire business collapsing, leaving them only with the textbook rentals (which bring in much lower revenue).

However, Chegg also doesn’t want to be openly antagonistic to governments or universities, as  these institutions also have great power to bring Chegg down if they choose to try. As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that Chegg might cooperate with colleges when cases of extreme cheating are under investigation.

It’s also unclear how Chegg would respond to individual professors who reach out to see if their students have signed up for Chegg. Especially if the professor just wants to confirm that a couple students are using Chegg, there’s a significant chance that Chegg would provide that information.

Some professors have reported that Chegg gave them information such as IP addresses, which show compliance and goodwill while still making it awfully difficult for professors to act on the information. 

It’s frustrating not to have more hard facts on how and when Chegg would answer queries from universities, but a rule of thumb is to expect that they would cooperate with colleges regarding any students suspected of cheating.

A final note is that student to specifically submit questions are in more danger, as there are reports of Chegg providing the username or IP address of the account that requested a specific solution.

Again, we don’t have hard evidence either way, but that’s our best read on the situation.

How Can I Get Chegg Answers for Free?

Is Chegg free?

To get Chegg answers for free, some students have employed dubious methods which generally fall into two categories. The first is to join a community where people share Chegg answers with others, and the second is to use technical skills to unblur Chegg answers.

For example, there are multiple Discord servers whose sole purpose is to provide their members with free Chegg answers, even using bots to automate and speed up the process. 

The CheggAnswers Reddit forum is another of these community sharing options that students use to view Chegg answers for free.

When you think about it, it’s kind of ironic really. The same students using Chegg to cheat in college also want to cheat Chegg out of the monthly subscription fee. Chegg could have seen this coming, you know?

Still, with their revenue continuing to skyrocket because of these services, Chegg seems to be doing just fine for themselves. 

Obviously, they’ll continue to work on new methods to crack down on unofficial distribution of Chegg answers, so that more students are forced to pay for the monthly subscription.

Finally, there’s also the temporary ethical solution of just using Chegg’s free four-week trial of Chegg Study.

Does Chegg Have Coupons?

Chegg does offer coupons from time to time. For example, RetailMeNot has a $5 off offer for the first month of Chegg Study or Chegg Study Pack.

A much better offer is Chegg’s four-week free trial, but this promotion isn’t available all the time either. Unfortunately, most students aren’t going to save much money with Chegg coupons.

How Can You Unblur Chegg Questions?

To unblur Chegg questions, some students have found technical workarounds to view blurred answers. These involve variations of using “Inspect Element” in a web browser, then mousing over the blur effect and deleting the blur’s <div> tag.

A Quora answer from Azlan Ahmad Salmini outlines the process in three steps:

  • Right-click on page in your web browser and click “Inspect Element”
  • When a list appears, move your cursor over each item until the blur effect is highlighted.
  • Place the cursor there on the pop-up box and delete that one <div> tag, then the pop-up box will disappear and you can view the content.

Again, this is a case of students cheating Chegg out of subscriptions in order to cheat in college, so the irony is strong.

Chegg obviously doesn’t want students to unblur questions—they want students to pay for their services. It’s highly likely that future tech changes from Chegg’s side will make it impossible to unblur questions.

Sharing methods, on the other hand, may prove much more difficult for Chegg to control, but there will always be plenty of students willing to pay for the convenience of using Chegg’s services directly, and these workarounds obviously don’t provide a comparable experience.

Obviously, we should mention that these methods are also unethical, just like cheating at college. When it comes to Chegg, there’s just a lot of unethicality going around!

Is Chegg Illegal?

Citron Research claims that Chegg is illegal in 17 states. These state laws forbid companies from making a profit distributing college answers with “reasonable knowledge” that the users will submit these answers for academic credit.

Before we go further, we should mention that we aren’t lawyers and this is certainly not legal advice, just an interesting theoretical question.

While Citron Research makes a compelling case that Chegg Study should be illegal in some states, we don’t know of any lawsuits that states or universities have brought against Chegg. Chegg would seemingly have a good chance to successfully defend themselves in a lawsuit as well.

The state laws use different phrasing, but Chegg doesn’t have reasonable knowledge that any specific user is cheating with Chegg Study, and Chegg seems to comply to a large extent with university misconduct investigations (and even provides some assistance to individual professors).

While states may be able to prove that Chegg knows some users are using Chegg to cheat, Chegg could provide an almost endless list of services that some students are cheating with.

Whether or not Chegg Study services are illegal in some states, Chegg does continue to operate without hindrance in the entire United States.

A more dangerous scenario for Chegg is a lawsuit from their former partners at Pearson Education. Pearson claims that Chegg has violated Pearson copyrights in a massive fashion by providing answers and explanations to problems in Pearson workbooks.

This sort of lawsuit would impact Chegg’s future in all 50 states, and seems to have much more potential danger for Chegg as a company.

What is Chegg? Is Chegg illegal?
Chegg’s recent lawsuit from Pearson Education could shift the entire higher education landscape.

Is it illegal for students to use Chegg? According to Lutins and Pilgreen Law, cheating in college is sometimes a crime:

“For example, if you cheat by bribing a professor with money or something else they want, then that could be a punishable offense. Cheating on an SAT or ACT test and applying to a college could lead to accusations of fraud.”

The authors do note that “the average student isn’t cheating in a way that is going to result in criminal prosecution”. Criminal charges are much more likely to arise in situations that involve a large number of students cheating that impacts the entire school. 

Defrauding and bribery are two other types of college cheating that can lead to criminal charges.

In general, students cheating with Chegg are much more likely to be warned, suspended, or expelled for breaking their university’s student honor code. 

While these repercussions aren’t criminal charges or necessarily illegal, they can still have a dramatic negative impact on students’ lives.

Even if it isn’t illegal for students to use Chegg Study to cheat in college, there can still be very serious outcomes for students.

How to Cancel Chegg Study?

To cancel Chegg Study, simply log in to your account on Chegg’s website and follow this link. You can also search for “cancel Chegg Study” into your search engine and follow the directions on Chegg’s website.

Chegg Study subscriptions through iTunes and Google Play have slightly different cancellation links, but don’t worry. If you can’t figure out how to cancel your account, Chegg does have solid customer support.

Chegg even has taken the unusual step of having an actual phone number to call support. The Chegg support line is 855-477-0177.

Can you delete Chegg accounts?

What is Chegg? Can you delete Chegg accounts?

Yes, you can delete your Chegg account. Before you can delete your account, you must return all rented textbooks (digital or physical), and cancel all of your active subscriptions.

From there, you can follow Chegg’s instructions here to request complete deletion of your user account data.

With Chegg’s reputation among professors, some students want to delete their Chegg accounts entirely. It’s doubtful that this would have any impact on a potential academic investigation, or on what information Chegg might hand over to a university.

Of course, there are others who simply used Chegg for textbook rentals and want to delete their accounts.

Who Owns Chegg?

Initial founders and stakeholders include Josh Carlson, Mike Seager, Mark Fiddleke, Aayush Phumbhra, and Osman Rashid. Today, Chegg is owned by public stakeholders, including Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, who owns a significant amount of shares.

As a publicly traded company, you can own a slice of Chegg too! In fact, Chegg stock holders have been rising quite a wave as Chegg’s stock price has risen dramatically in the Covid-19 pandemic era.

As we mentioned before, this rise has been met with sharp criticism from some, as remote quizzes and testing have made it harder for institutions to prevent cheating.

Are there more Websites like Chegg?

Yes, there are more websites like Chegg with online question solving services. Chegg competitors include Course Hero, Crazy for Study, SolutionInn, StudentShare, Transtutors, and Quizlet.

These Chegg competitors each have their unique spin related to online answer services, with various differences in offerings and price.

Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Course Hero

Course Hero is one of Chegg’s best known competitors, offering on-demand homework help and textbook solutions.

With the slogan, “Make every study hour count”, Course Hero has created 60 million study materials, divided into their courses. 

Like most Chegg competitors, Course Hero also emphasizes the in-depth nature of their textbook solutions and explanations.

Course Hero also offers Homework Help services that are available 24 hours a day, with answers in as little as 15 minutes.

Course Hero’s free plan is more extensive than Chegg’s, and they also offer a similar premium subscription model.

Websites like Chegg competitors and alternatives

2. Crazy for Study

Based in Delaware, Crazy for Study offers two core services: homework help and textbook solutions. 

The textbook solutions include “step-by-step textbook solutions by our PhD experts”, and Crazy for Study claims to have answered millions of textbook problems.

For their assignment help, Crazy for Study entreats students to “Get the best assignment assistance by our PhD experts. Our experts customize the answers to meet your professor’s expectations. Get plagiarism-free assignment solutions 24×7.”

3. SolutionInn

SolutionInn is a Chegg alternative where you can hire online tutors for homework help. Their three core offerings are:

  • Textbook Solutions
  • Expert Q&A
  • Live Tutor Sessions

The live tutor sessions set SolutionInn apart, but the textbook solutions and expert question and answer services are in direct competition with Chegg’s services.

4. StudentShare

While some of Chegg’s other competitors seem almost like Chegg clones, StudentShare is more specialized, and more shady. 

StudentShare allows students to download papers “for inspiration” for as low as 23 cents a day. Students can search by topic to find a paper on the subject.

For as low as $9.78 a page, StudentShare will have someone “eliminate plagiarism from the essay”. It sounds as though a human will take the downloaded paper and write it in their own words. As we said, it sounds pretty shady.

Or, you can pay as low as $13.60 per page to just write your essay from scratch.

With slightly different services, StudentShare isn’t as direct of a Chegg competitor.

5. Transtutors

Transtutors doesn’t seem to have joined the textbook solution game, but they do have a question and answer service as well as online tutoring. 

The Transtutors slogan reads, “Get Answers. Get Unstuck. Study Faster.” With a database of over four million questions and answers spanning 10 subjects, you can find a lot of questions already answered on Transtutors.

Their 24/7 tutor service is a similar service to SolutionInn’s live tutors, while the question and answer section is a direct Chegg competitor.

6. Quizlet

Quizlet is another Chegg competitor with textbook solutions on a wide variety of subjects. With thousands of textbooks in their database, they offer trusted step-by-step answers to all of these textbook problems.

Quizlet allows you to browse by subject or search to find your textbook. Once you find the question you’re looking for, you can reveal the answer explanation bit by bit, so that you can work along with the problem.

Quizlet’s advanced flashcard technology and database is another strength of their offering.

What is Chegg? Student studying on laptop

Conclusion

Chegg is a disruptive leader in the EdTech industry which has grown explosively in the pandemic era. The increased revenue has come with increased controversy, and it’s hard to deny that many students do use Chegg to cheat in college.

We’ll be curious to see where Chegg moves from here, as their new Uversity initiative seems to seek a new status quo in higher education.

Massive open online course providers like Coursera and edX have blazed a trail here, but both are beholden to universities (whom they partner with).

On the other hand, Uversity aims to partner with individual professors, meaning the learning platform might aim to replace the traditional college experience entirely. Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig was quoted by Forbes as saying, “I don’t know why you can’t binge-watch your education.”

With their Chegg Study model in danger from the Pearson lawsuit, we’ll see if Chegg pivots to the more reputable strategy of replacing colleges entirely.

For now, Chegg will keep dishing out solutions to thousands of college students and raking in the dough.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this comprehensive review of Chegg and Chegg’s services! For more of the latest news and reviews in college, you can check out our latest blog articles here.