Spelling.live vs Spelling Shed, Squeebles, Sir Linkalot and More - An Honest Comparison

There are some genuinely good spelling apps for UK children - and picking one is harder than it should be, because they're all built around different ideas of what "spelling practice" means. Some are game platforms, some are adaptive courses, some are mnemonic libraries, and some are test simulators.

This post compares spelling.live with the six apps UK parents ask us about most - Spelling Shed, Squeebles, Sir Linkalot, DoodleSpell, Spellzone and Nessy - plus two newer arrivals, Penpoints and SpellCast Academy. We've tried to be fair - each of these apps does something well, and for some children one of them will be a better fit than us. We'll say so where that's true.

One honesty note before we start: prices and features below were checked in July 2026 and may have changed - always confirm on each app's own site before subscribing.

What we compared

For a UK primary-age child, we think six questions matter most:

1. Can it practise this week's actual school list? Most UK schools send home a specific list for Friday's test. An app that can't load it is practising the wrong words.
2. Is it aligned to the National Curriculum? Common exception words for KS1, the statutory 100-word lists for Years 3–4 and 5–6.
3. Is the audio British English? Colour, not color - and a voice that says the word the way the teacher will.
4. Does it cover handwriting? Spelling tests are handwritten. Typing b is not the same skill as writing b without flipping it.
5. Does it tell parents anything useful? Not just a score - which patterns are behind the mistakes, and what to practise next.
6. What does it cost?

Quick comparison

* Home pricing at the time of writing; Spelling Shed covers up to 5 children, Squeebles up to 4, DoodleSpell is bundled with DoodleEnglish per child, Nessy is per child. Check each site for current prices.

Now the detail - and, importantly, what each app does better than a table can show.

Spelling Shed - the school favourite

Spelling Shed is probably the best-known name here, because so many UK schools use it - and if your child's school already assigns Spelling Shed homework, using it at home is the obvious move. It's a game platform: timed spelling rounds, letter-tile games, and multiplayer "hive" games, all mapped to the National Curriculum with four difficulty levels per list. Home subscriptions cover up to five children for £29.99 a year, which is genuinely good value.

Where spelling.live differs: Spelling Shed is typing- and tile-based - there's no handwriting anywhere, and lists are entered by hand. spelling.live lets you photograph the paper list that came home in the book bag, practise with handwriting as well as typing, and mark real paper tests from a photo.

Squeebles - the parent's-voice test simulator

Key Stage Fun's Squeebles apps have been loved by UK families for over a decade, and their party trick is still unique: you record the test words in your own voice, so your child hears exactly the accent and vocabulary they'll hear on Friday. The current app, Squeebles Spelling Connect, adds 160+ pre-recorded curriculum lists, good per-child stats, and mini-game rewards, at a pocket-money price.

If what you want is purely a low-cost test simulator with a familiar voice, Squeebles is a lovely, focused app.

Where spelling.live differs: Squeebles is app-only (no browser version), lists are typed in by hand, and practice is typing-based. spelling.live works in any browser, reads lists from a photo, uses a consistent British English voice out of the box, and adds the things a test simulator can't do: handwriting checking, pattern-level diagnosis of every mistake, and AI coaching built on the specific wrong spellings your child has tried.

Sir Linkalot - mnemonics and animations

Sir Linkalot takes a completely different approach: hundreds of short, witty animations that build memory "links" for tricky words - the kind of words that can't be sounded out. It's dyslexia-friendly, covers etymology and homophones, and for a child who's hit a wall with a stubborn word like necessary, a good mnemonic can be exactly the key that turns.

Where spelling.live differs: Sir Linkalot is a curated library, not a practice tool for your list - reviewers note its words follow its own grouping rather than the National Curriculum lists, and we couldn't find a way to practise a custom school list. It's also the kind of app that works best as a supplement. spelling.live is built the other way round: start from the words your child was actually set, then bring in hints, mnemonic-style coaching and phonics breakdowns for the ones that won't stick.

DoodleSpell - the adaptive daily habit

DoodleLearning (a Bath-based UK company) sells DoodleSpell as part of its adaptive suite. Its engine builds a personalised daily programme, targets gaps automatically, and the streak-based "Doodling every day" model is very good at building a little-and-often habit. It's curriculum-aligned and works offline.

Where spelling.live differs: the adaptive programme chooses the words - which is the point, but it means DoodleSpell isn't designed around practising this week's school list for Friday. It's also the most expensive option here for a single child, since DoodleSpell comes bundled with DoodleEnglish (from £69.99 a year per child at the time of writing). spelling.live is list-first and adds handwriting - though we'd be the first to admit Doodle's habit-building streak mechanics are excellent.

Spellzone - for older spellers

Spellzone is a web-based spelling course: a diagnostic Spelling Ability Test, then a structured path through spelling rules and their exceptions. It was explicitly designed for learners who find children's spelling apps too childish - which makes it a strong choice for secondary-age students, older strugglers and adult learners, and a weaker fit for a 6-year-old learning common exception words.

Where spelling.live differs: we're aimed squarely at the primary years Spellzone deliberately grew out of - picture hints, games, gentle feedback and handwriting support for ages 5–11. If your child is heading into Year 7 and beyond, Spellzone is one of the better options out there.

Nessy - the SEN specialist

Nessy Reading and Spelling came out of the Bristol Dyslexia Centre and is built on structured-literacy principles. For a child with dyslexia or a significant reading difficulty, Nessy's systematic phonics progression, video lessons and weekly parent email make it arguably the strongest specialist programme on this list - and if that's your situation, we'd genuinely encourage you to look at it.

Where spelling.live differs: Nessy follows its own progression rather than your school's weekly lists, there are no custom lists, and it's priced per child (from around £10.50 a month). spelling.live isn't a full dyslexia programme - but SEN support runs right through it, as we'll come to below - built in, not sold as a separate product.

Two newcomers worth knowing about

Both of these are very new, with little independent review coverage yet - so treat what follows (and their own marketing) accordingly. We include them because they're doing interesting things.

Penpoints is an indie app built by a father whose dyslexic son attends a British-curriculum school, and it shares part of our thesis: spelling practice belongs on paper. The app dictates a word list, the child writes on real paper, and a photo of the page is checked by AI for spelling and handwriting, with results emailed to the parent. It's aligned to British year groups and free at the time of writing.

Where spelling.live differs: Penpoints covers the dictation flow - dictate, write, photograph. spelling.live is more flexible with paper: alongside dictation tests, it also reads a sheet that has already been marked - the ticks and crosses on the test that came home from school - so last week's real results count too, not just tests you run yourself. And in spelling.live a photo isn't the end of the journey: every word from it lands in the same progress record, gets diagnosed by the pattern engine, and feeds the spaced-repetition schedule and the reports every adult around the child can see - rather than arriving as a one-off emailed result.

SpellCast Academy is a UK web app built squarely on the National Curriculum statutory lists (Reception to Year 6), with pre-recorded British narration, a friendly wizard-and-creatures theme, and a deliberately calm design - no timers or leaderboards. Family pricing is £2.99/month or £19.99/year for up to four children at the time of writing. It launched very recently, so there's little track record to judge it by yet - but a calm, UK-first take on curriculum spelling is a welcome addition.

Where spelling.live differs: SpellCast is screen-only practice against the statutory lists. spelling.live starts from your school's actual list (typed or photographed), adds handwriting and paper marking, and diagnoses the pattern behind each mistake rather than just tracking right and wrong.

What you won't find anywhere else (as far as we can tell)

We searched hard, and we could not find another spelling app that does these things:

Photograph a spelling list and start practising. Every other app on this list needs the words typed in - or doesn't take custom words at all. Point your camera at the sheet from the book bag - or a whole term's spelling log book - and the list is loaded.

Turn paper practice into progress data. Spelling tests happen on paper, so spelling.live works on paper too. Photograph a marked paper spelling test - ticks, crosses, wobbly handwriting and all - and the app reads it, records which words were right and wrong, and folds it into your child's progress record. Or run a full dictation test: the app reads the words aloud in British English, your child writes them on numbered paper like the real thing, and a photo of the page gets marked automatically. (Penpoints, above, has arrived at photo-marked dictation too - reading a test that was already marked by hand, and feeding every paper result into a diagnostic engine, is what we still haven't seen anywhere else.)

Find the pattern behind every mistake. This is the piece we think matters most. Most apps mark a word right or wrong and move on. spelling.live diagnoses why: every mistake is matched against the spelling patterns that actually cause them - silent letters, doubled consonants, homophones, unstressed vowels and more - so instead of "8/10", you learn "the silent letters are the problem". The Skills Check goes further: a short, calm spelling inventory that scores the patterns inside each word, shows you which ones your child has mastered and which need work, and automatically builds a focus list from the gaps - ready to practise in any mode or game. (Spellzone and Doodle have diagnostics too, to be fair - but we couldn't find another app that explains each individual mistake at the pattern level and turns the result straight into a practice list.)

Check handwriting, not just spelling. Letter formation, reversals and spacing are assessed by AI, on screen or from paper - because the Friday test is handwritten, and typing b correctly doesn't catch a flipped b in writing.

An AI coach that learns your child's actual mistakes. Not generic tips - advice built from the exact wrong spellings your child has tried, as we explained in why we don't offer guest mode.

Games that practise the words - not games with spelling bolted on

Plenty of apps have games. The question worth asking is: whose words are in them?

In spelling.live, every game - Word Search, Boggle, Balloon Pop, Word Builder, Crossword, Letter Climb, Letter Maze and the rest - is played with the words on your child's own lists. Balloon Pop, for example, floats convincing near-miss misspellings of this week's actual words next to the right one, so even the "just for fun" moments are rehearsing the exact spellings that will be on Friday's test.

The reward loop points the same way: coins are earned only by spelling practice, and spending them buys plays of a game - so the games stay the treat that practice pays for, never a way to avoid it. And game results are kept separate from the accuracy report: popping the wrong balloon under time pressure is not the same as misspelling a word in a test, so it never distorts what the progress report tells you.

An app you shape around your child - not the other way round

Children aren't interchangeable, so spelling.live's parent controls work per child, behind a PIN if you want one. From each child's settings you decide exactly what their practice menu offers:

• Choose the practice modes they see - Pick it, Write it, Type it, Say it (voice) - and hide the ones that don't suit them yet. A five-year-old might only see Write it with letter-trace guides; a confident nine-year-old might have everything on.
• Tune the details - how many tries they get on Write it, whether typing shows only the word's letters as tiles (the default for early years), navigation arrows, a "flash word" look-cover-write-check button, and more.
• Control the games - set what each game costs in coins and how many plays a purchase grants, per game, for all your children at once.
• Searchable settings - there are a lot of dials; a search box in the parent panel finds the right one in seconds.

None of the other apps we looked at offers this depth of per-child shaping of what the child actually sees.

One child, all their adults - parents, tutors and teachers around the same record

Real children have more than one adult helping them: two parents in different homes, a grandparent, a tutor on Thursdays, a teacher setting the weekly list. In spelling.live they can all be connected to the same child:

• Invite another parent or a tutor by email to your child's profile - everyone sees the same lists, the same progress, the same reports. No duplicate accounts, no "which app is the up-to-date one?"
• Teachers and tutors get classes. A teacher or tutor can group children into a class and assign a spelling list to the whole class with a due date and a note - typed, photographed, picked from the curriculum presets, or generated from a topic. Each pupil sees the assignment on their own card with a Practise button, and once the due date passes, anyone who hasn't finished is flagged so nothing slips.
• Aggregate reporting, if they want it. The class report rolls up accuracy and tricky words across the whole group, so a teacher can see at a glance which words the class is struggling with - while parents still get the individual view at home. (And as everywhere in spelling.live, game play never counts towards those numbers.)

So the loop actually closes: the teacher sets Monday's list once, the child practises at home all week, and the teacher, tutor and both parents are looking at the same live record by Friday - not four separate apps guessing at each other.

SEN support, built in - not a separate product

Nessy is the specialist programme here, and for a diagnosed dyslexic child it may well be the right primary choice. But spelling.live takes SEN seriously across the whole app, as standard:

• Reading settings, per child: a choice of fonts - Standard, Clear (Lexend, designed to reduce visual crowding) or OpenDyslexic - plus optional colour overlays (cream, blue, rose, mint, grey) and relaxed letter/line spacing, with a live preview so you can see exactly how reading will look before you commit. Settings sync across devices, so they travel with the child.
• A gentler handwriting mode: softer feedback messages, a tolerance boost so near-misses are encouraged rather than penalised, and letter-trace overlays on by default for early writers.
• Speech slow-down and low-pressure mode: for children who need the audio slower, or who freeze under timers and streaks.
• Calm by design: mistakes get a "nearly there" and another go, not a buzzer.

You can read more about our approach in Accessibility at Spelling.live.

And on price

You'll notice we've left our own price out of the comparison, and that's deliberate. spelling.live is in early access: everything above is available to use today, and we're still working out what a fair long-term pricing model looks like - based on how families actually use the app, not guesswork. The AI-powered extras run on a monthly credit allowance to keep usage sustainable in the meantime. We'd rather this comparison stand on what the app does; see the site for the current position on pricing.

The honest summary

• Your school already uses Spelling Shed? Use it for the homework - it's good. Add spelling.live when you want handwriting practice, paper-test marking, or to find out why the same words keep going wrong.
• You just want a cheap, simple test simulator in your own voice? Squeebles is lovely.
• One stubborn word list that won't stick? Sir Linkalot's mnemonics are a great supplement.
• A child with dyslexia who needs a full structured programme? Look at Nessy first - and know that spelling.live's dyslexia-friendly fonts, overlays and gentle modes are there as standard if you want both.
• An older child or teenager? Spellzone.
• Teaching a class, or tutoring several children? spelling.live's classes let you assign one list to everyone with a due date and see the whole group's progress in one report.
• You want to practise the actual list from the book bag - loaded by photo, practised in games built from those very words, diagnosed pattern by pattern, with handwriting checked and real paper tests marked from a photo? That's exactly what spelling.live was built for.

Is there anything you'd like to see?

One last thing. Almost everything described above - the paper marking, the Skills Check, the tutor classes, the SEN reading settings - exists because a parent or teacher asked for it. If you've read this far and thought "I wish one of these apps did X", we genuinely want to hear it: tell us and there's a fair chance it ends up in the app. We're a small team improving the service every week, and the families using it decide what gets built next.