Every semester, the same ritual plays out in dorm rooms and study groups around the world: "What app should I use for this?" Students spend hours researching tools when they should be learning. We built something to fix that.

Our new Students section offers curated tool stacks for eight of the most popular university courses, each one tailored to actual coursework, not generic productivity advice.

What's included

Each course-specific stack covers the tools a student actually needs across their degree. Here's what we've launched with:

  • Computer Science. VS Code, GitHub Student Pack, Replit, and the best free resources for learning to code outside lectures
  • Engineering. CAD tools with student licences, MATLAB alternatives, and collaborative project tools
  • Business & Economics. Spreadsheet power tools, financial modelling resources, and presentation apps that don't look like every other slide deck
  • Design & Creative Arts. Figma (free for students), affordable Adobe alternatives, and portfolio builders
  • Medicine & Health Sciences. Anki for spaced repetition, anatomy apps, and citation managers built for heavy research
  • Law. Case management tools, legal research databases with student access, and document comparison tools
  • Mathematics & Statistics. LaTeX editors, computational tools, and graphing calculators that actually work well
  • Communications & Media. Free video editing, podcast production on a budget, and social media scheduling

Why course-specific stacks matter

Generic "best tools for students" articles always recommend the same five apps: Notion, Google Drive, Grammarly, Todoist, and whatever calendar app is trending. Those are fine, but they miss the point.

A Computer Science student needs fundamentally different tools than a Law student. A Design major's workflow has almost nothing in common with a Medicine student's. Treating all students the same is lazy curation.

We talked to students across different programmes and asked one question: what do you actually use daily for your coursework? Their answers informed every stack.

Free and discounted, verified

Every tool in our student stacks has been verified for student pricing or free tiers. Many tools offer generous student plans that aren't well-advertised. GitHub's Student Developer Pack alone includes tools worth hundreds of pounds per year. We surface these so you don't have to hunt for them.

Where a tool doesn't have a student discount, we've included genuinely free alternatives that hold up for academic work. No "free trial" bait-and-switches.

What's next

This is a starting point. We're planning to add stacks for more courses, including Architecture, Psychology, and Data Science, based on which ones get the most requests. We're also looking into partnering with university societies to keep the recommendations grounded in real usage.

If your course isn't covered yet, or you think we've missed a tool that deserves a spot, head to the Students page and let us know.

Build more. Search less.