by John Reed· Last Updated: Aug 28, 2026
Question banks are where GMAT scores are actually built. Full-length mocks tell you where you stand; banks are what move you. But the headline numbers vendors advertise are close to meaningless on their own, because 50,000 community-contributed questions and 4,000 professionally curated ones are not the same product.
We compared the seven banks most GMAT students consider, verified every price live in August 2026, and worked out what you actually pay per question.
Here's the bottom line:
| GMAC | Target Test Prep | e-GMAT | GMAT Club | Manhattan Prep | Magoosh | Manhattan Review | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $49.99–$114.99 | $299–$1,099 | $249–$499 | Free–$29.99/mo | $39 | $199–$449 | Free |
| Questions | 975+ (2,100+ bundle) | 4,000+ | 7,500 | 50,000+ | 1,000+ | 800+ | 348 |
| Cost Per Question | ~$0.05 | ~$0.24 | ~$0.07 | Free–low | ~$0.04 | ~$0.44 | $0 |
| Real Retired Questions? | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Video Explanations? | No | 2,200+ | Yes | Community | No | Every question | No |
| Curated? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Community | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Best For | Official practice | Quant | Verbal + volume | Free volume | Value | Video learners | No-signup practice |
Cost per question, cheapest first. Question count and question quality are close to unrelated.
GMAC's own bank is non-negotiable. It is the only source of real retired GMAT questions, and no amount of third-party quality substitutes for practising on the genuine article.
The base Official Guide 2026-2027 eBook and Online Question Bank costs $49.99 for 975+ questions including 100+ new items. The four-book bundle at $114.99 raises that to 2,100+ questions across the main guide plus the Quantitative Review, Verbal Review, and Data Insights Review titles, with 250+ questions available only in the online bank. A separate Official Practice Questions Bundle at $79.99 adds 300+ more that do not overlap with the guides.
That non-overlap matters and is confirmed by tutors who have worked through all of them: the main Official Guide, the Review guides, and the Practice Questions bundle are distinct pools. You can buy all of them without paying twice for the same material.
The drawbacks are real but manageable. Answer explanations are frequently criticised as convoluted, the difficulty ceiling is limited so top scorers exhaust the genuinely hard material quickly, and the Wiley-hosted interface is clunky. It is also not adaptive and gives no predicted score. Use it as your source of truth, and use a better-explained bank alongside it.
Target Test Prep pairs 4,000+ questions with 1,500+ lessons and 2,200+ instructor-led video solutions, the deepest explanation coverage in GMAT prep. Its Quant reputation is the strongest in the category, and deservedly so.
The feature students single out is the error tracker, which logs not just which questions you missed but why, and how often you repeat each error type. Most banks tell you your accuracy; TTP tells you your failure pattern. Combined with fully customisable practice sets and chapter reinforcement tests, it is the most structured way to work through weak areas.
Pricing is Self-Study at $299 per month, $949 for 4 months, or $1,099 for 6 months, with OnDemand at $1,599 and LiveTeach at $2,199.
Two things to know. At roughly 24 cents per question it is by far the most expensive bank here. And TTP includes no full-length practice tests at all — that is a deliberate design choice, because they direct students to GMAC's official mocks for score prediction. Budget for those separately; see our GMAT practice tests comparison.
Scholaranium is the largest curated bank in GMAT prep at 7,500 questions, and it is bundled with e-GMAT's course plans at $249 for 2 months, $379 for 4 months, or $499 for 6 months. Those plans also include 5 SIGma-X full-length adaptive mocks and 90 sectional tests.
Its distinguishing feature is ability-level reporting. Rather than only tracking accuracy, Scholaranium estimates your proficiency per sub-section and surfaces which specific areas are capping your score. For students who have plateaued and cannot work out why, that diagnostic layer is worth more than raw question volume.
e-GMAT's Verbal instruction is widely rated the strongest in the category, which makes it the natural counterweight to Target Test Prep's Quant focus. If Verbal is your bottleneck, start here.
The trade-offs: it is not sold standalone, so you buy the course to reach the bank, access starts at just 2 months, and the sheer volume of analytics can overwhelm students who simply want to drill.
GMAT Club hosts more GMAT questions than anywhere else on the internet: 50,000+ contributed and curated by the community over two decades. Browsing the forum bank is free and unmetered, and every question carries community and expert explanations. Bunuel's Quant solutions in particular are a genuine institution and routinely clearer than official ones.
The structured Adaptive Quiz layers filtering, an error log, and an analytics dashboard on top. There is a permanently free tier of 8 questions per day with no credit card required. Paid plans are $19.99 per month for Linear or $29.99 per month for Adaptive, and — unusually — can be redeemed with GMAT Club Rewards points earned by contributing to the forum rather than with money.
The important caveat is that 50,000+ is a community aggregate, not a curated bank. Quality varies question to question in a way it does not at e-GMAT or TTP, so do not read that number as ten times better than Scholaranium's 7,500. Verbal and Data Insights coverage also lags Quant, score prediction is widely considered inaccurate, and questions cannot be reviewed once a free period ends.
The Manhattan Prep Qbank, now branded Manhattan Prep powered by Kaplan, is the best pure value in GMAT prep: 1,000+ problems for $39 with 6 months of access, which works out to about 4 cents per question.
It covers all eight GMAT Focus question types, including the Data Insights formats that most banks skimp on — Tables, Graphs, Multi-Source Reasoning, and Two-Part Analysis. Every question and explanation is written by Manhattan Prep's 99th-percentile instructors, and explanation quality has long been the brand's strongest asset, with reviewers regularly rating them above GMAC's own.
A free tier of 100 problems spanning all eight question types lets you test the bank before paying anything, which is a genuinely fair trial.
Know what it is: a drill bank with no lessons, no full-length CATs, and no adaptivity. The interface is dated, and hard Quant items skew toward laborious multi-step problems rather than clever ones. As a cheap supplement to official material, it is hard to beat.
Magoosh bundles 800+ questions with 200+ video lessons, and its defining feature is that every single question carries both a video and a written explanation. No competitor matches that at this price.
Its Quant lessons earn consistent praise for teaching where formulas come from rather than asking you to memorise them, and its score predictor has a good reputation for accuracy. Plans run $199 for 30 days, $249 for 6 months, and $349 for 12 months, with an up-to-70-point score guarantee and a 7-day refund window.
The problems are volume and balance. At 800+ questions this is the smallest paid bank here and the most expensive per question at roughly 44 cents. Verbal draws consistent criticism above the 650 level, some Sentence Correction material is dated against current official questions, and Data Insights coverage is thin relative to the current exam. Good for video learners early in prep; not enough on its own for a 700+ target.
Manhattan Review's free bank asks for no account, no email, and no payment, which is genuinely rare. It covers Problem Solving, Data Sufficiency, Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning, and all four Data Insights formats.
Its real strength is explanation depth. Alongside the correct answer it explains each wrong option and names the specific error, and it shows the percentage of other test takers who picked each choice — peer benchmarking that most free banks lack.
Now the correction. The site advertises "400+ Free GMAT Practice Questions," but the bank's own counter reads 348. Of those, 100 are Sentence Correction items retired from the current GMAT Focus exam and kept as a legacy resource, which leaves roughly 248 questions in current format. That is a useful supplement, not a study plan. There is also no progress tracking, error log, or timer.
One practical note: Manhattan Review is not Manhattan Prep. They are unrelated companies with confusingly similar names, and the Qbank reviewed above belongs to Manhattan Prep.
Start from what is actually limiting your score:
A realistic combination for most students is the GMAC bundle at $114.99 plus one strong third-party bank. That covers official material for accuracy and third-party material for volume and explanation quality, which is the pairing that actually moves scores.
Before you buy, our free GMAT study plan generator will map your weeks to your test date, and the free GMAT Quant practice questions give you an honest read on Problem Solving at no cost. If you want instruction rather than just questions, see our GMAT prep course comparison.
GMAC's Official Guide Online Question Bank, because it is the only bank containing real retired GMAT questions. For a third-party bank alongside it, Target Test Prep is the strongest for Quant and e-GMAT Scholaranium for Verbal. On value alone, the Manhattan Prep Qbank at $39 for 1,000+ problems is the best deal in GMAT prep.
Yes, and some are substantial. GMAT Club offers 8 adaptive questions per day free forever with no credit card, and its 50,000+ forum question bank is free to browse. Manhattan Prep gives 100 free problems across all eight question types, Manhattan Review offers 348 free questions with no signup, and GMAC's free Starter Kit includes 70+ official questions plus two full-length exams.
Most students who improve significantly work through 2,000 to 4,000 questions over two to three months. Volume alone is not the point though. Reviewing every miss carefully and tracking recurring error patterns matters more than raw count, which is why banks with strong explanations and error tracking tend to produce better results than larger but thinly explained ones.
No, and this is deliberate. Target Test Prep provides chapter reinforcement tests and fully customisable practice sets, but no full-length exams, because it directs students to GMAC's official practice exams for score prediction. If you use TTP, budget separately for official mocks.
They are useful but variable. GMAT Club's 50,000+ questions are community-contributed rather than professionally curated, so quality ranges from excellent to poor. The community explanations, especially Bunuel's Quant solutions, are frequently better than official ones. Treat it as a huge free supplement rather than a structured curriculum, and do not compare its 50,000+ directly against a curated bank like e-GMAT's 7,500.
The bundle at $114.99 gives 2,100+ questions across four titles versus 975+ for the $49.99 single guide, which is better value per question and includes 250+ questions available only online. Since the guides do not overlap with each other, the bundle is the sensible choice if you are studying for more than about six weeks. The single guide is enough for a short retake preparation.
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