Moldavite vs Brilliant
One is a diamond — cut and polished. The other fell out of the sky and landed in Bohemia.
First, the honest part
Brilliant is excellent. Its courses are hand-crafted by teams of teachers and illustrators over months, and the polish shows. If what you want to learn is in their catalog — the math, science, CS and data fundamentals — you'll be in good hands there.
We built Moldavite for everything that isn't in a catalog.
A different job
Brilliant answers "teach me from your library." Moldavite answers "make me a course about this." You describe what you want to learn — or upload your own lecture notes, slides, or a PDF — and a few minutes later you have an interactive course on it: visual lessons, quizzes, exercises, progress. No catalog can keep up with what you got curious about at 2am, and it doesn't have your professor's notes.
Side by side
| Brilliant | Moldavite | |
|---|---|---|
| Topics | A curated catalog: math, science, CS, data. | Anything you can describe. No catalog limit. |
| Where content comes from | Hand-crafted by expert teams over months. | AI-generated for your prompt in minutes. |
| Your own material | Not supported. | Upload notes, slides or PDFs — they become the course. |
| Format | Interactive lessons and quizzes. | Interactive lessons, quizzes, exercises, XP and streaks. |
| Changing a lesson | Wait for their content team. | Ask the chat — "make lesson 2 more visual" — and it edits itself. |
| How you start | Browse the catalog, pick a course. | Type one message. The course is the reply. |
| Price | Subscription for catalog access. | Free to start (50 credits/mo, ~2–3 courses). Pro $9/mo. |
When to pick which
Pick Brilliant if you want beautifully polished fundamentals from a curated library and you're happy learning what's on the menu.
Pick Moldavite if the topic isn't on anyone's menu — flash attention, your niche of biochemistry, this semester's actual course material — or if you'd rather start from your own documents and have a course now, not whenever a content team gets to it.
About the name
A brilliant is a diamond cut — the result of careful, patient polishing. Moldavite is also a real gemstone: forest-green glass formed about 15 million years ago when a meteorite hit hard enough to melt rock, found almost exclusively in Bohemia, where we're from. It's rarer than diamonds and nobody polished it — it just happened, fast, on impact. We thought it fit.
Free plan: 50 credits a month, enough for 2–3 full courses. Pro is $9/mo.
Brilliant is a trademark of Brilliant Worldwide, Inc. Moldavite is not affiliated with or endorsed by Brilliant. This comparison reflects our understanding of their publicly described offering at the time of writing; check their site for current details.