Caktus AI Review: Is It Still Worth Using in 2025?

Are you also tired of shifting from one tool to another for help as you get through your assignments and study sessions?

I know, I sure was!

I was lucky to get my hands on Caktus AI, a single platform that promises to handle essay writing and STEM assistance (yes, it does claim to solve all your SQL queries!)

But how good is it really? I tested it myself to see how it actually works and how it performs in the hands of a user. 

And in this Caktus AI review, I spill all the details I noticed about Caktus AI so you can decide if you really need it or if it’s just another generic AI.

Let’s get started!

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Key Takeaways

• Caktus AI is an education-first generative AI platform for students and educators trained on scholarly data.

• It was founded by Tao Zhang and Harrison Leonard in 2022 and has already attracted over 2.6 million users in just a few years.

• Caktus runs on its proprietary model, Eguana, built in partnership with Multimodal and trained on around 5 billion tokens of academic text.

• Its toolset exceeds 40 specialized modules that cover essay writing, citation generation, summarization, and STEM problem-solving. 

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What Is Caktus AI?

Caktus AI is an educational-focused generative AI platform built for students. It is trained only on scholarly sources across the internet.

Therefore, it is a very suitable AI tool for students and educators.

Caktus AI was founded in 2022 by co-founders Tao Zhang and Harrison Leonard. 

According to its App Store listing, over 2.6 million users have downloaded Caktus AI, which is an impressive figure for a platform that’s barely a few years old.

The platform houses more than 40 specialized tools for different needs a student may face.

We can roughly divide those tools into aspects: 

1. The writing suite includes an Essay Writer, Paragraph Generator, Personal Statement Builder, Citation Generator (with support for APA, MLA, and Chicago styles), and a Text Summarizer. 

2. A STEM assistant, which includes problem-solving tools for Physics, Chemistry, Math, and Coding. The Coding Assistant supports all popular programming languages ( Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript).

Caktus AI puts a lot of emphasis on integrity in AI, as stated on the website, “every feature encourages revision, comprehension, proper citation, and responsible academic use.” 

The Tech Behind Caktus AI 

At its inception, the founders  launched a GPT-3-powered tool for students, however, the founders were quick to reach the conclusion that using off-the‐shelf models wasn’t sustainable for their domain because they wanted to prioritize academic rigor.

By December of that same year, they had partnered with Multimodal to build a proprietary model (named “Eguana”) trained on academic data. 

It is currently the world’s best LLM for academic needs.

A case study reports that approximately 5 billion tokens of academic text were used in training Caktus.

Key Features of Caktus AI

Caktus AI isn’t built for everyone, which is precisely its strength.

It only targets students and academic writers and has a good list of features for this audience, such as:

• It runs on models trained on millions of peer-reviewed papers and scholarly texts

• The text it produces includes verifiable references, which is a deliberate move to ensure that its generated text comes from real academic sources. It essentially reduces the “hallucination” issue common to general AI writers.

• It provides step-by-step problem solving for STEM queries

• It contains a unified workspace for study materials like notes, drafts, citations, and assignments

• Caktus’s entire system is wired around responsible use of AI 

How Much Does Caktus AI Cost?

Is Caktus AI free? Unfortunately, Caktus AI does not offer any open-ended free plan.

There used to be a small free trial for you to test the waters before you commit to a paid plan.

The trial gave you 5,000 characters of free usage so you could explore how the tool writes, cites, and solves problems. 

After that, you needed a paid plan to keep going. That free trial, however, has been discontinued.

The pricing information is as follows:

• The monthly plan is priced at $19.99/month, which gives you full access to the platform without long-term commitment. If you get it for a year, you’ll be paying around $240. 

• The annual plan is for $8.33/month, billed $99.99 per year, which is a more cost-efficient route. It brings the per-month cost down by more than half compared to the monthly plan.

There’s no feature limitation between the two. So, the only real difference is how much you want to save and how long you plan to stick around.

How Does It Work?

You’ll need to create an account or log in before actually getting started with Caktus AI.

Once you’re in, you land on a clean, focused dashboard that looks like a digital study desk.

The Essay Writer is the natural place to begin for most users.

Once you click on it, it requires you to select what you want written out of three options: 

1. An easy essay, the length of which is entirely decided by you, which also allows you to block or include citations

2. A simple essay, which by default includes citations from scholarly sources 

3. A detailed essay, which includes citations from academic sources, and multiple other personalization options to control the tone and style of your essay. 

 It requires you to type in a prompt and pick your citation style (APA, MLA, or Chicago).

You can also upload your own readings or notes for it to reference, or search Caktus’s internal database for credible sources.

Here’s what the dashboard shows when you click on ‘Easy Essay’: 

All you have to do is describe your topic and select how long you want to be. The moment you hit ‘Generate,’ the AI goes to work building a structured essay. 

When writing a detailed essay, you also get to see some tone customization options:

The same dashboard gives you access to STEM assistants for math, physics, chemistry, etc.

There are also plenty of other tools, like a summarizer, paragraph generator, AI detector, translator, and interview prep module, all living under the same roof.

Is Caktus AI Flagged as AI-Generated Content?

To figure out whether content generated by Caktus AI can be flagged by AI detectors, let’s conduct a quick AI detection test.

Here is a thesis body paragraph generated through Caktus AI:

Now, let’s test this generated paragraph using Undetectable’s AI detector which is ranked as one of the best AI detectors by ZDNet.

Now, as you can see, Undetectable AI’s AI detector has correctly identified the content generated by Caktus AI as 99% AI, which means that Caktus AI content can be flagged as AI generated and can not help you bypass AI detection.

Comparison Between Caktus AI and Undetectable AI

Here is a transparent, side-by-side comparison between Caktus AI against one of its alternatives, Undetectable AI.

Category	Caktus AI	Undetectable AI
Who it’s for	Students and educators only	Writers, marketers, students, educators, basically anyone who needs close-to-human AI assistance
Number/scope of tools	Large, education-centric toolkit (40+ tools for writing, citation, STEM, summarizing, workspace).	A more advanced set of features, including an AI detector, an AI humanizer (rewriter), plagiarism checks, and utility features (APIs, job applier, etc.).
Dedicated STEM tools (math/physics/chem/coding)	Yes. Built-in step-by-step math and science solvers and coding helpers.	No dedicated STEM toolset. But there is an all-in-one “Ask AI,” useful for broad homework help.
“undetectable” claims	Offers a humanizer, but user reports show that Caktus-generated content is flagged by detectors.	Core product includes a humanizer + detection aggregator that is cited by independent tests/reports, as “human-like” across detectors.
Pricing	Monthly ≈ $19.99; Annual ≈ $99.99/yr (≈ $8.33/mo).	Multiple pricing tiers are available.
Free trial / free tier	No free trial or any persistent free plan.	A huge number of tools are forever free to use.

What Makes Undetectable AI the Superior Choice

Caktus AI is really good for general homework help due to its specialized tools. But if your priority is undetectable, human-level output, Undetectable AI really steps ahead of Caktus AI.

The humanizer in Undetectable AI actively works on the tone and structure of the text so it reads like it was written by an experienced writer.

Unlike Caktus centered on student workflows only, Undetectable AI supports content creators, marketers, SEO professionals, educators, and students.

There have been multiple independent tests and experiments that find the Undetectable AI detector accurate at differentiating between AI and human-written text.

The same can not be said about Caktus AI.

If you use Caktus to draft academic essays with citations, make sure to always run the draft through Undetectable AI’s Paraphraser, SEO Content Writer, or AI Stealth Writer tools.

With this workflow, you can optimize the text and reduce the likelihood of detection flags! 

Use our AI Detector and Humanizer right below.

Conclusion

After putting Caktus AI through extensive testing, my verdict is that it sure is an impressive, feature-rich platform with a user-friendly interface.

The proprietary model trained on billions of scholarly tokens is great at solving STEM queries.

But in practice, a lot of its benefits are overshadowed by the fact that the text it produces is not as human-sounding as we expect from an academic AI tool.

I found Undetectable AI to be a far stronger alternative for reliable, human-like AI output that you can trust.

Give Undetectable AI a try today!