This page gets found by people searching for the best English test for USA immigration, so the honest thing is to correct the premise before comparing anything. This site does not cover immigration. It tracks English test requirements for university admission, and not one of the 1,042 program records in its database is an immigration rule. Immigration routes set their own language requirements, on their own timelines, and no score comparison on this page can tell you what a visa officer will ask for.
Admission is a different question, and it is the one students mix up
The confusion is understandable. The same test names, IELTS, TOEFL, Duolingo, PTE, appear in both worlds, so it is easy to assume one score serves both. It does not. A university admits you against the minimums its programs publish. An immigration authority assesses you against rules it publishes. If your goal is a US university seat, the admission question is the one worth answering well, and it has a useful property the immigration question lacks: the requirements are countable.
If you arrived here with an immigration goal rather than an admission one, the useful next step is not a test comparison at all. It is the official immigration guidance of the country you are targeting, read directly, because those pages name the exact tests, scores and validity windows their officers accept, and they are the only source that can. Nothing in this site's database should be quoted to an immigration authority, and nothing there should be quoted back to a university either. Two systems, two rulebooks, and keeping them separate is the first genuinely useful thing this page can do for you.
Which test the universities document most
Across the 1,042 harvested records, 965 state an IELTS minimum and 764 state a TOEFL iBT minimum. Duolingo appears in 363 records, PTE Academic in 321, and CAEL, a Canadian test, in 72. Read the chart as a documentation map, not a ranking of test quality. IELTS is the most widely documented requirement in this database, TOEFL is a strong second, and the newer tests are documented by a minority of programs. The practical consequence: the best test for your admission is the one your specific target programs list, at a minimum you can reach. A test your dream program does not document is worth nothing to that application, however convenient its format or price.
What the coverage chart cannot tell you
Three cautions before you treat those counts as gospel. First, documentation is not acceptance. A program that does not state a Duolingo minimum in this database may still accept Duolingo and publish the fact somewhere the harvest did not reach, or the other way round. Absence from a database is a prompt to check the program page, never a verdict. Second, the database is global, which is why a Canadian test like CAEL appears in it at all. It counts requirements across many university systems, so it cannot describe any single country's admission habits, and it certainly cannot describe an immigration system, which is a different authority with different rules. Third, minimums move. Programs revise them between cycles, and the record you find today is a snapshot, not a promise.
Used with those cautions, the chart still earns its place. It tells you where the burden of proof sits. If your target test is documented by 965 programs and your backup by 363, the backup needs a specific reason, a named program that lists it, before it deserves your study weeks.
Once the test is picked, compare plan apps on five things
1. Plan length: does it cover your actual weeks until test day, or a generic 30 days?
2. Daily load: 20-30 minutes sustains; 2 hours collapses by week two.
3. Mock tests: full, timed, and scored. Anything less is a quiz.
4. Weak-band detection: does it tell you writing is the problem, or just show scores?
5. Price model: one-time $9.99 beats a subscription you forget to cancel.
Everything else is decoration. Download two apps, run each for three days, keep the one whose daily task you actually finished.
Run the plan against the test date
The 8-Week Score Sprint Planner is built around exactly those five tests of a plan: your test, your test date, your current score and your target go in, and a week-by-week schedule with daily tasks comes out, sized to the weeks you actually have. Pick the test from the requirements, pick the plan from the calendar, and leave immigration questions to the official immigration sources, which are the only ones that can answer them.