IELTS Liz vs IELTS Simon (2026): Which Free Site Is Better?

Quick verdict: IELTS Liz is the better all-round free site - broader, better organised and still actively updated across all four skills. IELTS Simon remains the single best free source for Writing method, taught with an ex-examiner's simplicity. Use Liz for coverage, Simon for essays, and add scored practice elsewhere.

Ask any IELTS teacher which free sites they recommend and these two names come up within seconds. Both are one-person institutions: real former IELTS professionals who spent years publishing free lessons that outperform most paid courses on clarity.

They are also genuinely different, and the differences decide which one deserves more of your study time. Here is the honest head-to-head as things stand in 2026.

What each site actually is

IELTS Liz (ieltsliz.com) is a structured free library: tips, video lessons, model answers and practice exercises organised by test section, plus regularly refreshed lists like the current year's common essay and speaking topics. It reads like a course syllabus that happens to be free, and it is still actively maintained in 2026.

IELTS Simon is the teaching identity of a former IELTS examiner whose daily short lessons - especially on Writing - became legendary for their simplicity.

The hosting platform behind his original blog closed in late 2025, and his active teaching now lives on a membership site and newsletter as of 2026, with much of the classic material preserved.

Both give away, free, the kind of examiner-grade insight that coaching centres charge for. Neither is a practice platform - keep that in mind throughout.

Content quality and coverage: Liz

The Liz site is the more complete syllabus. Every section of the test has its own hub - tips, common mistakes, model answers, practice exercises - and the navigation makes self-study genuinely manageable. Her annually refreshed topic lists are among the most useful free pages in IELTS preparation.

Simon's strength is depth over breadth. His lessons are shorter and sparser in coverage, but each one teaches a single idea with unusual precision. Nothing on the internet explains a Task 2 essay plan in fewer, clearer words.

Winner: Liz for overall coverage and organisation. If you only bookmark one site for everything, it is hers.

Writing method and model answers: Simon

Simon's Writing method is his monument: a four-paragraph essay approach so simple it looks like cheating, backed by Band 9 model essays written in deliberately plain language. His core lesson - that examiners reward clarity and task focus, not decoration - has rescued thousands of candidates from overwritten Band 6 essays.

The Writing material from Liz is excellent too, and broader: both tasks, both modules, letter types, question types, and her paid advanced Task 2 lessons go deeper than her free pages. But on pure essay method, Simon's ex-examiner perspective is the sharper instrument.

Neither site scores your essays, though - a model answer shows you the destination, not your distance from it. Pair either with our guide to the Band 7 essay structure and a checker that grades your actual writing. Winner: Simon.

Reading and Listening help: Liz

Liz maintains dedicated Reading and Listening sections with strategy pages for the major question types, common-mistake lists and practice exercises. For a free site, the question-type coverage is impressively systematic.

Simon published plenty of good Reading and Listening lessons over the years, but they were always the supporting cast to his Writing material, and the archive format makes them harder to study in sequence.

Neither offers timed practice with scoring or explains why a specific distractor caught you. For that layer, unlimited scored passages on a practice engine complement either site. Winner: Liz.

Speaking preparation: Liz

The Speaking hub on ieltsliz.com is one of the best free resources in the field: Part 1, 2 and 3 question banks, model answers, tips on fluency and pronunciation, and topic lists that track what candidates actually report seeing.

Simon's speaking lessons carry the same trademark clarity - his advice on answering naturally rather than reciting memorised chunks is timeless - but the volume is smaller.

Winner: Liz, on sheer usefulness per week of preparation.

Pricing and paid extras: a genuine tie

Both sites are free at the core, which is the headline. Liz sells a small set of advanced Writing Task 2 video lessons and e-books through her store (periodically discounted, streamed with multi-year access as of 2026). Simon offers a paid membership with his video course and current teaching.

Both paid tiers are modest one-off or membership purchases rather than heavy subscriptions, and both are honest products: you know exactly what you are buying because the free material shows you the teaching style first.

Winner: tie. Neither paid tier is necessary; both are reasonable if you want more of what the free pages already give you.

Progress tracking: neither - and it matters

Here is the structural limit of both sites: they are static teaching libraries. You read a lesson, you nod, and nothing measures whether it changed your performance. No scoring, no wrong-answer analysis, no band trend.

That is not a criticism of Liz or Simon - they set out to teach, and they teach brilliantly. But stuck candidates are usually stuck on a measurement problem: they do not know which question types are bleeding marks.

Winner: neither, which is precisely the gap the third option below exists to fill.

So which should you choose?

Bookmark Liz as your default free syllabus - broadest coverage, best organisation, still current. Go to Simon whenever the topic is Writing: read his method pages and model essays before you write a single Task 2 practice essay.

This is not really an either/or; both are free, and the serious answer is both, in those roles. Our roundup of the best free IELTS practice websites places them in the wider free landscape.

What neither can do is close the loop: practise, get scored, see why you lost marks, watch the band move. For that you need an instrument, not a library.

How to actually study from a free teaching site

Free sites fail candidates in a predictable way: passive reading. You scroll through twenty tips pages in an evening, feel productive, and retain three of them. The fix is to treat each lesson as a task, not an article.

A concrete loop that works: pick one question type or task per session. Read the relevant Liz page (or Simon lesson) once, write down the two or three moves it teaches, then immediately do a timed practice set applying only those moves. Review your mistakes against the lesson before moving on.

For Writing, the equivalent: read one Simon model essay, outline its paragraph logic in four lines, then write your own answer to a different question using that skeleton under 40 minutes. Comparing your essay to the model afterwards teaches more than reading five more models.

Done this way, two lessons a day beat twenty - because each one gets converted into a measurable behaviour instead of a bookmark.

One more free-site habit worth stealing from teachers: keep a mistake journal. Every time a Liz exercise or a practice question catches you, write the question type and the reason in one line. After two weeks, the journal - not the sites - tells you what to study next.

And set a weekly retest: the same question type, timed, once a week. Free teaching plus a homemade measurement loop is a surprisingly complete preparation; the loop is the part most self-studiers never build.

The third option most people actually pick: IELTSbiz

Full disclosure before this section: IELTSbiz is our own platform, so weigh that as you read. Liz and Simon are genuinely excellent, and nothing below claims otherwise - the point is that they solve a different problem.

IELTSbiz is the measurement layer that a teaching site cannot be. The practice engine generates unlimited fresh Cambridge-style Reading passages across all 11 question types, and when you get an answer wrong it names the specific trap that caught you - paraphrase bait, scope shift, opinion-versus-fact - rather than just showing the key.

Every session updates your per-question-type band tracking, so "I keep losing marks on Matching Headings" stops being a feeling and becomes a number with a trend line.

For essays, the AI Writing Checker grades against all four official criteria: IELTSbiz's study of 1,200 essays found AI band scores matched human examiners within ±0.5 bands in 94.2% of cases.

It is free to start with no card required, then $6.99/month or $29 lifetime - see pricing. The honest limits: it does not replace the Liz topic lists or the Simon method essays, and it offers no human teaching. It measures; they teach.

The stack most self-studiers land on: Liz for the syllabus, Simon for Writing method, IELTSbiz for scored practice and the band trend that proves the studying is working.

Read Liz. Study Simon's essays. Then go get measured - because the band you cannot see is the band you cannot fix.