Gauth vs Mathway: Which Should You Use?

Mathway takes the app, the free answer volume, the graphing, the camera, and the price. Gauth takes one row that happens to be the whole reason people search for a math solver in the first place: whether the working comes with the answer before you have paid anything.

Those two free tiers are not really competing for the same student. Mathway's is built for verification — you have done the work and want to know if you got it right, twenty times over, at no cost. Ours is built for diagnosis, which is a smaller number of longer answers. Decide which of those two problems you have before you compare the numbers, because the tool that solves the other one will look bad no matter how good it is.

Gauth. The first solution is free, with no account and no card, and it includes the steps. A free account gets three solutions a day. Gauth Plus is $11.99 a month with a three-day free trial, $31.99 a quarter, or $99.99 a year, as of September 2026. Follow-ups are included and do not count against the daily allowance. See the pricing page for the current plans.

Mathway.Free gives you answers and shows ads. Mathway's own premium terms list Step-by-Step Access at $9.99 a month or $39.99 a year as of September 2026, and note that the subscription also reduces advertising. Those terms do not describe a free trial, though promotional trials surface from time to time, and app-store listings in some regions show different amounts from the website — so confirm both the price and the trial on the checkout screen rather than in a review. Chegg acquired Mathway in June 2020, and Chegg's own math solver page now points at Mathway, so if you already pay for Chegg's Study Pack check what your subscription covers before buying a second one. They remain separate products with separate subscriptions.

At $39.99 a year Mathway is among the cheapest unlimited-steps subscriptions in this set, level with Symbolab and well under half what Gauth Plus costs annually. If all you need is steps and you are certain you need them all year, that is the number to beat.

Try $\frac{x}{x-2}=\frac{2}{x-2}+3$. It looks routine, and it is engineered to punish anyone who trusts the algebra without looking at the domain. Clearing the denominator gives $x=3x-4$, so $x=2$ — and $x=2$ is precisely the value that makes both denominators zero. The correct answer is that there is no solution.

Mathway will get this right. Free, it will tell you the answer, and that answer is a short phrase: no solution. Write that on your homework with nothing above it and you will get almost nothing for it, because the marks here are for noticing the excluded value, not for the conclusion. To see the line where $x=2$gets rejected you need Step-by-Step Access, and even then the output is a structured chain of operations rather than an explanation of the trap. That is not a criticism of accuracy — Mathway's engine is algorithmic and it does the algebra properly — it is a statement about what the free tier is designed to give you.

Gauth starts where the problem actually is. Before clearing anything it says that $x=2$must be excluded because it kills the denominator, does the algebra, arrives at that exact value, and names the result as an extraneous root rather than a solution. Then you can ask the question the whole problem exists to provoke — "so when does multiplying both sides by a variable create a fake solution?" — and get an answer in the same thread. Marks for this sort of question are almost entirely method marks, which is why how graders actually allocate credit line by line is worth ten minutes of your time.

Extraneous roots are not a quirk of this one equation. Any step that is not reversible can manufacture them: squaring both sides, multiplying by an expression containing the variable, or cancelling a factor that might be zero. Solve $\sqrt{x+7}=x-5$ and squaring produces $x^2-11x+18=0$, so $x=2$ or $x=9$. Only 9 survives: at $x=2$ the left side is 3 and the right side is −3, and the square root symbol does not return a negative value. A tool that shows only the final answer set cannot teach you to expect that. A tool that shows the rejection teaches it once and you carry it into every radical equation afterwards.

There is one workflow Mathway serves better than anything else here, and it is the healthiest workflow in this whole category: do the problem yourself, then check it. The free tier answers as many problems as you care to enter. A student working through a problem set can verify every question without paying, which is more free utility than most solvers offer and considerably more than three solutions a day. Used that way, Mathway supports learning rather than replacing it.

The engine deserves credit too. Mathway is algorithmic rather than generative — it computes rather than composes — so on a well-formed equation it is deterministic and it will not fabricate a plausible-looking step. That is a real advantage over any AI-written solution, including ours, and it is the reason serious students often keep a symbolic tool around as a second opinion. If your priority is an answer you can trust without re-deriving it, that architecture is the right one.

The input experience is also better than a single text box. Mathway splits into subject-specific modes — basic math, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finite math, linear algebra, chemistry, physics, graphing — and each gives you a keypad arranged for that subject. Entering a matrix, a definite integral with awkward limits, or a chemistry expression takes a couple of taps rather than a fight with notation. Add snap-and-solve from the phone camera and interactive 2D graphing, and Mathway covers input and visualisation ground that Gauth does not cover at all.

Finally, price. At $39.99 a year as of September 2026, unlimited steps from Mathway cost well under half what unlimited Gauth costs. If you have already decided that symbolic steps are enough for you, buying the more expensive explanation layer is money spent on something you will not read. Pair Mathway with an equation solver you can check work against and you have a perfectly serious setup.