Trajecta vs · Kollegio
Kollegio is a free AI college counselor: matching, essay support, a scholarship finder, application planning, and activity feedback, at no cost. Trajecta has a free tier that overlaps some of that, and a paid layer, $24.99 a month or $249.99 a year, that does what free products do not: unlimited profile-aware essay feedback, per-entry activity coaching, a Common Data Set grounded list, and a committee read of the finished application. This page draws the line between the two honestly.
01 · Area by area
Kollegio descriptions below are their own wording from kollegio.ai, retrieved on the date under the last panel. The honest headline: their free product and our free tier overlap, and the differences concentrate in the paid layer.
01
With Kollegio
Kollegio’s whole product is free: college matching, essay support, a scholarship finder, application planning, and activity feedback. Their site reports 300,000+ students and families using it. Free with no paid tier above it is the strongest pitch in this market, and it deserves to be taken at face value.
With Trajecta
Trajecta’s free tier covers profile building, the direction compass with its evidence list, mission planning, and college list organization, no credit card. The paid layer above it is where the two products stop overlapping. If your budget is zero and stays zero, use whichever free product fits you better, or both.
02
With Kollegio
Kollegio matches students to schools using what it describes as thousands of data points, aiming to find the colleges that align with your profile. It is a matching engine: profile in, aligned schools out.
With Trajecta
Trajecta computes direction before it computes schools: a two-axis compass places the student from their record with a ranked evidence list, suggests major clusters, and drafts the narrative the profile could carry. The college list then scores fit and admission data against each school’s published Common Data Set, and every school links to a public data page the family can check.
Browse the college data →03
With Kollegio
Kollegio helps students write essays that sound like them, and it is explicit that it does not write essays for students, a stance worth respecting. The support is AI feedback in the drafting flow.
With Trajecta
Same stance, deeper wiring: feedback is inline on every draft and tied to the full profile, which is how it catches an essay that contradicts the activity list or repeats what the file already says. A brainstorm workspace comes first. In Pro, a specialist essay reader also files a report inside Committee Review before the officers weigh the essays against everything else.
04
With Kollegio
Activity feedback is part of the free product: an assessment of extracurriculars to strengthen the list. For a free tool, shipping this at all is generous.
With Trajecta
The activity coach reads each entry for what it actually signals, flags where the description undersells the work, and rewrites it in the student’s own words. An evaluator scores any new idea for fit and selectivity tier before a summer gets committed, and missions turn the gaps into weekly steps across six profile-strength categories. This is Pro-side depth.
05
With Kollegio
Kollegio’s tools work item by item: match the schools, plan the applications, draft the essays, tune the activities. The judgment of how the finished application lands as a whole is left with the student.
With Trajecta
That judgment is the flagship. Committee Review puts the entire finished application in front of a simulated room: an essay specialist files first, four AI officers read the whole file through different lenses and disagree in writing, and a chair resolves the recorded split into a decision with next steps, anchored to the school’s own numbers. It reruns every time the application changes.
Watch a full run on a real application →Kollegio feature descriptions and user figures verified against kollegio.ai. Retrieved July 19, 2026. Trajecta pricing current as of the same date.
02 · Side by side
| Kollegio | Trajecta | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Free, with no paid tier above it. | Free tier, then $24.99/month or $249.99 a year for Pro. |
| College matching | Data-point matching: profile in, aligned schools out. | Direction first, then a list scored against each school’s Common Data Set. |
| Your essays | AI feedback in the drafting flow. Will not write for you. | Unlimited inline feedback aware of the whole file. Also will not write for you. |
| Activities | Free assessment of the extracurricular list. | Coach reads and rewrites per entry, fit-scored new ideas, missions. |
| The finished file | Reviewed piece by piece as you build it. | Deliberated whole by a simulated committee, rerun on every change. |
| Honest limits | How the free model is sustained is not described on their site, and depth has a ceiling somewhere. | The deepest features cost money. A simulation is not a prediction, ours included. |
Both columns are honest. The limits row applies to us too.
03 · Credit where due
A free competitor is the easiest to dismiss and the hardest to beat. The credit here is unhedged.
Free, for everyone, actually
A capable AI counseling tool with no paywall reaches exactly the students traditional counseling misses. Whatever else this page argues, hundreds of thousands of students getting free help is a good outcome, and Kollegio built it.
The authenticity stance
Kollegio states plainly that it will not write essays for students. That is the right line to hold in this product category, it costs them impatient customers, and we hold the same one.
Scholarships in the box
A scholarship finder inside the free product addresses the part of admissions that decides whether college happens at all. Trajecta does not have one. If scholarships drive your search, keep a Kollegio account for that alone.
04 · FAQ
Yes. College matching, essay support, the scholarship finder, application planning, and activity feedback are all free per their site, which reports 300,000+ students and families using it. Their site does not describe a paid tier or how the free model is funded. Verified against kollegio.ai in July 2026.
They cover different ground. Kollegio’s free product includes essay support, activity feedback, and a scholarship finder. Trajecta’s free tier is the profile layer: the direction compass with evidence, mission planning, and college list organization. A student with no budget can sensibly run both and keep whichever earns the habit.
The deep layer: unlimited inline essay feedback tied to the full profile, an activity coach that rewrites entries and fit-scores new ideas, a college list scored against each school’s Common Data Set, and Committee Review, where an essay specialist, four AI officers, and a chair deliberate the entire finished application and give a decision with next steps.
If the free layers cover what you need, do not pay. Pay when the specific things behind Pro matter to you: iteration without limits, coaching per activity entry, CDS-grounded list scoring, and a committee read of the whole finished application. That set does not exist in any free product we know of, ours included.
No, and both say so explicitly. Kollegio states it does not write essays for students. Trajecta gives feedback, structure, and rewrites of activity descriptions in the student’s own words, and treats the essays as the student’s to write. Colleges are increasingly good at detecting outsourced writing, and it is also just the wrong way to apply.
Yes. The free tier needs no credit card and includes profile building, the direction compass, missions, and college list organization. Pro at $24.99 a month or $249.99 a year adds the essay feedback, activity coaching, and Committee Review.
Build the profile, watch the compass and missions compute from it, and only pay if the deep layer earns it.