Revision Village vs Save My Exams for IB: Which to Buy?

The short answer for IB students

If you want someone to teach the course around the questions, Revision Village is the IB-only product built for that. If you want one cheap account covering the subjects you actually sit, Save My Exams is the broader membership, and it is priced per year rather than per course.

The mistake to avoid is buying the bigger brand name and then studying the same way you did before. Both sites sell you access; neither forces you to attempt questions with the materials closed. That part stays your job.

Two purchase models, not just two websites

Revision Village lists a free plan at $0 forever with no credit card, “Single Course Gold” at $249 billed once, and “Complete Learning Suite Gold” at $499 billed once, with a seven-day money-back guarantee. Its free tier is a subset of topics inside a course, not a free copy of the questionbank.

Save My Exams lists a free plan and paid plans; at the last check on 12 September 2026 the join page showed $40 for one month, $48 for three months and $96 for twelve months, with a seven-day free trial. PMT's own comparison, published in October 2025, reports the equivalent UK pricing as £12, £30 and £48.

Run the arithmetic against your own timetable. Two years of a membership costs less than a single Revision Village course, and one Complete Learning Suite covers 30+ IB courses for one payment. If you take three or more IB subjects and nothing outside IB, and you will use the videos, the suite is not the expensive option. If you are finishing DP1 and only need eight months of coverage, the recurring plan is the smaller commitment.

Where Revision Village earns its price

The questionbank is the core. Question sets are organised by topic and difficulty, and Revision Village advertises mark schemes and video solutions for every question. Past-paper pages add full worked solutions taught by IB instructors. Practice Exams cover topic quizzes, full-syllabus mocks and a revision ladder; Prediction Exams are mock papers written for the current cohort; Key Concepts are refresher summaries. Bootcamps, flashcards, a mobile app and the Newton AI assistant round it out.

It is also genuinely IB-only, which is the point. Nothing on the platform is diluted by GCSE content, and the material is written for IB assessment structures. Its own pages describe resources as designed and reviewed by IB examiners and experienced educators.

Treat the headline statistics as marketing rather than evidence. Revision Village states that 85% of IBDP students globally use it, that its Gold students are 4.5 times more likely to achieve a 7, and that Gold users outperform the worldwide IB average by 34%. Those are vendor claims about self-selected users; no independent study is offered on the page, and a student who buys a revision platform is already the kind of student who revises.

Where Save My Exams earns its price

Save My Exams' advantage is breadth per dollar. One membership covers GCSE, IGCSE, A Level, IB and AP, and the resources are notes, topic questions, model answers, flashcards, mock exams and marking tools rather than video walkthroughs. For a student taking IB Economics, English B and Biology, or for a household with siblings on different qualifications, that single account is doing more work than an IB-only purchase.

Its printing rules are also more open than people assume. Past papers and their mark schemes, together with the question papers for its topic questions, can be downloaded and printed. Its own mark schemes and model answers for exam questions cannot be downloaded or edited, for copyright reasons. If you build paper-based revision, that distinction matters.

The honest caveat: IB coverage is not uniform. Save My Exams' own support page says courses are built from the ground up starting with past papers, and that where only past papers exist for a course, more resources are on the way. Check the subject page for your exact course before paying, because “Save My Exams covers IB Chemistry” is not the same statement as “Save My Exams covers IB Chemistry in the depth you need”.

The third option, stated plainly

PastPaperPrep covers a smaller catalogue than either competitor, but it now spans live banks: Cambridge IGCSE Mathematics 0580, Additional Mathematics 0606, Biology 0610, Chemistry 0620, Physics 0625, Co-ordinated Sciences 0654 and Economics 0455, plus IB Mathematics AA and AI, Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Economics at HL and SL. The content is real past-paper questions with source metadata, filterable by course, topic, subtopic, year, paper, session and marks, and exportable as a printable set.

Prices are $6 per month or $48 per year for one bank, two to five banks from $10 per month or $84 per year, and six or more banks at $25 per month or $216 per year. Complete older exam years can be practised free.

What it does not have is teaching. There are no notes, no video solutions and no model answers, so it is a poor fit for a student who still cannot start the questions. It is a good fit for a student whose teacher explains the method, whose problem is that the same error keeps returning, and who wants twenty real questions on that skill rather than a video watched a second time. It is also not affiliated with the IB, and should never be described as official material.

When to buy which, and when to buy nothing

Take the free layers first. Revision Village's free plan gives you a subset of one course, Save My Exams' free tier gives you a limited set of topic questions and sample notes, and PastPaperPrep's free older exam years give you complete papers. Two weeks of honest use of those three tells you more about your own bottlenecks than any comparison article.

Then buy the missing layer: video-guided IB depth, or a broad membership with notes and model answers, or a cheap supply of real topical questions you can print. If you cannot name which of those is missing, the correct spend this month is zero.

• IB Maths AA HL plus two essay-based subjects, one budget account: Save My Exams.
• Three or more IB subjects and you learn from video explanations: Revision Village Complete Learning Suite.
• Teaching already sorted, and the same weak topic keeps recurring: one PastPaperPrep bank.
• Not sure you will watch the videos: start free on all three and revisit in a fortnight.