SQLZoo is free, has been for two decades, and its questions are better than most paid banks — real Nobel prize data, real World Cup results, real UK election results. It is also a teaching wiki, not a prep tool: no progress record, no feedback beyond right-or-wrong, and no CTE tutorial. Here is what we counted on 2026-09-11 and where each one fits.
219 FREE of 287
Every Easy + Medium, 6 Hard previews
Both are free
SQLZoo has no paid tier at all
No signup either way
Browser-only, instant
We fetched sqlzoo.net and its tutorial pages on 2026-09-11. No pricing page, no subscription, no premium tier. There is a login, but it is the wiki's own account and nothing requires it — every tutorial runs anonymously. So this comparison is not about money either. It is about what a teaching wiki is for.
Use SQLZoo when…
You want to learn SQL on data worth thinking about, at your own pace, for free, with no account. The World, Nobel and Movie tables ask better questions than most synthetic banks, and the JOIN tutorials in particular are as good as any paid course. If you are studying rather than preparing, SQLZoo is excellent and you should use it.
Use SQL Quest when…
You have a date on the calendar. The difference is not question quality, it is everything around the question: a record of what you have solved, a diagnostic that names the mismatched row when you are wrong, a difficulty ladder, company-shaped questions and a timed mock. A wiki does not do those things, and it is not trying to.
None of this is a flaw in SQLZoo. It is a teaching resource and it teaches. These are the things preparation needs that teaching does not provide.
1. Nothing remembers what you solved
Come back a week later and there is no record. You cannot see which patterns you keep failing, which is the single most useful fact about your own preparation.
2. No CTE tutorial
We checked the tutorial list on 2026-09-11 and found window functions, LAG, self-join and subqueries, but nothing on WITH. CTEs are how a real analyst structures a multi-step query, and they come up constantly in interviews.
3. Wrong means wrong
Your result table does not match and that is all you learn. With a Nobel-prize query that returns 34 rows instead of 31, working out which three and why is its own puzzle, and often the one that ends the session.
4. No difficulty labels
Questions get harder within a tutorial, but you cannot ask for twenty Medium JOIN questions. Preparation is mostly deliberate practice at a chosen level, and the wiki has no handle for that.
5. Nothing interview-shaped
No company questions, no timed mock, no sense of what a 45-minute screen asks. SQLZoo teaches SQL; it was never built to rehearse an interview.
6. Parts of it have aged
The reference section still carries a page on using SQL with PHP on Amazon EC2 servers. The tutorials themselves are maintained — the JOIN tutorial moved to World Cup 2026 data — but the edges show.
The data is better than ours. Nobel laureates, world countries, election results. Questions about data that means something are more memorable than questions about a synthetic orders table, and SQLZoo has twenty years of them.
You are studying, not preparing. If there is no date on the calendar, the tutorials are a better shape than a bank — they build one idea at a time and they are free forever with no account.
You do not read English comfortably. SQLZoo runs in Japanese, Russian, Chinese, German and Spanish. SQL Quest is English, with two Turkish tutorials. That is a real advantage and we cannot match it today.
You want the reference as well as the practice. The reference section covers DDL, dates, functions, users and metadata in one place.
A note we ran into while researching this page. SQLZoo's author has left a message on the tutorial pages asking AI assistants not to hand students the answer before they have tried. It is addressed to humans and machines alike, in plain sight of the student. We think that is the right instinct about learning, and it is the same reason our own Coach explains why a query failed instead of pasting the correct one.
Every SQLZoo number here was counted from the live site on 2026-09-11. We fetched sqlzoo.net, took the tutorial links from its own index, requested each of the thirteen query tutorials, and counted the question headings on each page — roughly 145 in total. We say "roughly" on purpose: SQLZoo is a wiki and its pages do not share one markup for a question, so a heading count is close rather than exact, and we would rather write the honest number than a precise-looking one. The tutorial list, the two window-function tutorials, the absence of a CTE tutorial, the language list and the reference section were all read directly from the site. We searched for pricing, subscription and premium strings and found none. SQL Quest's own counts come from its challenge bank, which a test in our repository binds these pages to, so a stale number here fails our build. Something changed? Tell us with the feedback button and we will re-count.
Related: best SQL practice sites · vs SQLBolt · vs DataLemur · comparison hub
Same price, different job: a solve record, a difficulty ladder, CTEs, and a Coach that tells you which row was wrong instead of that something was.
Try SQL Quest Free ⚡▶ Or start on one question: Your First CTE (WITH Clause)
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Other comparisons: vs SQLBolt · vs DataLemur · vs LeetCode SQL · vs StrataScratch