Nine AI Tools Hong Kong Teachers Keep Asking About in 2026: What Each Is Really For, What It Costs, and Whether Students May Use It

Read the terms of all nine tools end to end and one thing stands out that schools rarely notice: several of the strongest ones state plainly that students may not use them. Cursor requires users to be 18. Claude requires 18 and enforces it with age assurance. The free teacher plans from both OpenAI and Anthropic say in writing that there are no student accounts. Teachers are spoilt for choice; students are not — and that gap is the problem a school actually has to solve.

What follows is the complete September 2026 comparison. Each tool has its own detailed guide; this page does one job — getting you to the right tool for the right problem in ten minutes, and naming the problems no tool here solves.

The nine tools compared

Specific prices for Gamma, Edpuzzle, Perplexity and Khanmigo could not be verified from an official page for this article; rely on each tool's own guide and its official pricing page. All figures are US dollars, exclusive of tax, and every vendor reserves the right to change them.

What the free tiers actually allow

"Has a free tier" and "the free tier is enough" are different claims. These four allowances are verified against official pages:

The answer in that last column is usually what decides whether a school pays.

Which tool for which job

Making slides. Gamma is the purpose-built option, generating a deck straight from an outline. A general assistant such as Gemini or ChatGPT will help you write the content, but you still lay it out yourself. In practice: write the teaching content and its logic with a general assistant first, then hand it to Gamma for layout. Do not expect one step to do both.

Flipping a lesson. Edpuzzle is the only tool here designed for it: insert questions into an existing video, see whether pupils actually watched it, and collect their answers. Nothing else tells you which pupil got it wrong at minute seven. For the classroom design, see the Edpuzzle guide.

Research and fact-checking. Perplexity positions itself as search with citations, which suits curriculum design and professional reading where provenance matters. One caution worth passing to students: a citation is not a guarantee the citation says what the answer claims. The link still has to be opened.

An AI tutor for students. Khanmigo is the only one of the nine designed around student tutoring, asking Socratic questions rather than handing over answers. Its student side carries real constraints: a teacher cannot enable it for a class, access comes through a parent subscription or a district partnership, and paying parents must be 18 or over with a US billing address. A Hong Kong school would have to enquire through the district partnership route.

Writing or marking code. Three tools, three approaches. Cursor is a graphical editor and demonstrates best on a projector; OpenAI Codex is terminal-first and suits automation scripts and CI; Claude Code is also terminal-first with stronger Chinese writing, which helps when the output is a report for teachers. All three start at US$20 a month for an individual, all three assume the teacher understands basic programming, and none of them can be used by students — Cursor and Claude enforce an 18-year floor, and the Codex teacher plan excludes pupils explicitly.

Building a small app. Base44 is the only genuinely zero-code option: describe a reading log or an event sign-up page and it generates the interface, backend, database and login. Be aware that its billing unit includes how often people use the finished app, so an app rolled out to a whole year group consumes far more allowance than expected.

Lesson planning, question setting, marking and notices. This row is missing from the table above because no single tool solves it. It requires knowing your scheme of work, your panel's rubric and your school's notice format. A general assistant needs all of that restated every time, which caps the productivity gain. See a lesson plan in 30 minutes for how the workflow actually goes.

Four things no general-purpose tool does for a school

Each of the nine is strong at something. However you combine them, the following four never happen automatically — not because the tools are defective, but because they were never the goal.

One: gating the student side. What a pupil asked, what the AI answered, whether it simply handed over the answer, whether anything came up that needs a teacher — general tools do not address it and offer no interface for a teacher to look. Most vendors resolve the question by excluding minors in their terms, which is clean compliance but does not make the school's need disappear. A four-layer guard, live teacher monitoring and flagging, and an audit trail are things a school has to build separately. See student AI safety: four-layer gating, PII protection and teacher monitoring.

Two: knowing your particular school. Which chapter Primary 5 Chinese has reached, how many bands are in the composition rubric, what salutation and format your notices use — all of it lives only in the school's own documents. A general model guesses, and the teacher retypes the context each time. A school knowledge base makes the AI retrieve those documents and cite them; see a school knowledge base that makes AI cite your own materials and policies.

Three: a predictable whole-school cost. Every price in the table above is per user per month. Multiply any of them by 100 staff and the principal reconsiders. Here is the arithmetic on the prices verified for this article:

Converted at roughly HK$7.8 to the US dollar, for estimation only. Usage overage sits on top of all of these — OpenAI's own documentation puts Codex at an average of US$100 to US$200 per user per month. What a school needs is a number that goes into a budget line and does not blow up in March.

Four: grant and outcome reporting. The EDB "智" 啟學教 funding requires interim and final reports covering what was done, how many teachers and students took part, and what changed. No general tool assembles that, and stitching usage records from nine separate tools into one report is itself a substantial piece of work. See how to use the EDB HK$500,000 AI grant.

Those four, taken together, are why a school-based platform exists. Edor.ai is built for exactly this: designed for Hong Kong schools, teachers and students, with a Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong) interface, Cantonese and Putonghua oral practice, four-layer student gating with teacher monitoring, per-school annual pricing rather than per seat, data that belongs to the school with one-click full export, and a choice of cloud or on-premises deployment. We will not claim to beat Cursor at writing code or Gamma at building decks — that is not the same problem.

The nine full guides

Each guide covers the official prices, free-tier limits, student eligibility terms, a complete walkthrough, and a fair side-by-side with Edor.ai.

• Gemini for teachers — Google's general assistant and Workspace integration.
• Gamma for teachers — text to slides.
• Edpuzzle for teachers — questions in video and flipped lessons.
• Khanmigo for teachers — Socratic tutoring and teacher tools.
• Perplexity for teachers — AI search with citations.
• OpenAI Codex for teachers — agentic coding and credit-based pricing.
• Claude Code for teachers — agentic coding and the five-hour usage window.
• Cursor for teachers — the AI code editor and its 18+ terms.
• Base44 for teachers — building web apps with no code.

To compare the underlying models rather than the products, see the full model overview; to get the vocabulary straight first, start with the LLM classroom.

Takeaway

None of the nine is a wrong choice, and none of them is a complete answer for a school. The right reading is this: for individual teacher productivity, let teachers pick per task; for anything involving students, personal data or grant accountability, you need a platform designed for schools with gating, records and an export guarantee.

Before you buy, read 12 questions to ask before buying a school AI platform, verify every price above against its source link, and only then start comparing quotes.