The search engine for studying abroad - mapping 240,000+ programs so students anywhere can find where they belong.
THE MARK. The Studyportals wordmark - a classical portico paired with the two words that define the business: study and portals. Nine of those portals now serve tens of millions of students each year.
Choosing where to study is expensive, permanent and often made with almost no reliable information. Studyportals exists to fix that specific problem.
Studyportals is a Netherlands-based education platform that helps students discover, compare and choose study programs anywhere in the world. It runs nine consumer portals - Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal, PhDportal, Shortcoursesportal, Distancelearningportal, Scholarshipportal and others - each built around a different kind of search. Together they list more than 240,000 English-taught programs from over 3,500 institutions across more than 110 countries.
For a prospective student in Lagos, Jakarta or São Paulo, the value is simple: instead of visiting hundreds of university websites in half a dozen languages, they can search by subject, country, budget and start date in one place, read reviews from other students, and shortlist programs that actually fit. It is the difference between guessing and choosing.
That workflow - from a vague ambition to a concrete shortlist - is the whole point. Studyportals describes its mission in five words: "empower the world to choose education." The phrase carries a double meaning the company is careful to state: encouraging people to pursue education at all, and making the choice between options transparent.
The scale is the moat. No single university can show a student the full landscape, and no student has time to assemble it themselves. By aggregating the world's programs into one searchable catalog and layering student reviews on top, Studyportals occupies the neutral ground between institutions and applicants - and that neutrality is exactly what makes the data valuable to both sides.
What began in 2007 as Mastersportal, a side-project from an international student network that could not find good information on master's programs abroad, is now a fixture of global higher education - and, according to third-party web-traffic rankings, one of the most-visited student-recruitment platforms anywhere.
"Our mission is to empower the world to choose education." Studyportals · stated company mission
Studyportals is a two-sided platform. Students get a free search engine; universities get the demand signal they can't see on their own.
Roughly 40-55 million students visit each year from more than 110 countries - most of them looking for programs taught in English, outside their home country. They search, compare, read reviews, find scholarships and, increasingly, ask the AI advisor for guidance. It is free for them, always.
Between 3,000 and 3,700+ universities use Studyportals to reach and enrol international students. They pay for performance-based recruitment plus data, analytics and consulting - answers to questions like "which countries want our programs?" that they cannot get from their own websites.
The problem underneath both audiences is the same: information asymmetry. A student can't see the full market, and a university can't see who is looking. Before platforms like this, international recruitment ran on brochures, fairs and agents - expensive, slow and opaque. Studyportals replaced guesswork with a search box on one side and a demand dashboard on the other.
You can't recruit the students you can't see - and you can't choose a program you never knew existed. The information gap Studyportals set out to close
Studyportals never merged its brands into one site. Students search by intent - "master's," "PhD," "scholarship" - so the products are organized the same way.
The original portal and still the flagship: search and compare master's programs worldwide.
The founding productBachelor's and undergraduate program search across thousands of institutions.
Consumer portalDoctoral programs and research positions for the world's future academics.
Consumer portalShortcoursesportal and Distancelearningportal for online and short-format study.
Consumer portalsA searchable database of scholarships from institutions and organisations globally.
Consumer portalTurns aggregated student demand into recruitment strategy, portfolio advice and market analytics for universities.
The revenue engineIn November 2024, Studyportals launched Sophia - an AI Student Advisor built with AWS - guiding students in 20+ languages across 240,000+ programs. 85% of users who chatted with Sophia went on to explore its recommendations
The model is a classic two-sided marketplace. In 2011 Studyportals moved universities to a results-based system - they pay for outcomes, not impressions.
The expertise sits in the middle of that marketplace. Fifteen years of search behaviour across the world's students is a demand map no single institution could build. Studyportals sells access to it in two forms - as performance recruitment (universities pay when interested students are delivered) and as analytics and consulting, where the ACT team helps institutions decide which programs to launch, where to promote them and how to position against rivals. The consumer portals feed the data; the data feeds the business.
Studyportals competes with ranking sites, recruitment agencies and other aggregators - but few match its breadth of programs paired with first-party demand data.
Ranking brands sell prestige; agents sell placements. Studyportals is a neutral catalog covering programs at every tier, in every discipline, with student reviews - and it owns the search-behaviour data that comes from being the place students actually look.
Keystone Education Group (educations.com), IDP Education and Hotcourses, QS TopUniversities and Times Higher Education tools, plus review sites like EDUopinions - and, always, university websites and Google themselves.
Where it fits in the market is clear: Studyportals sits at the top of the international-student funnel, at the discovery and comparison stage, before an applicant has committed to anywhere. That position - early, neutral and global - is what makes it useful to students and valuable to the universities trying to reach them. Its 2025 acquisition of the Amsterdam student-life platform Uni-Life pushed that reach one step earlier still, into the question students ask before "where should I apply?" - namely, "would I actually want to live there?"
A spin-off from the ESTIEM student network launches to aggregate reliable information on master's programs abroad.
Incorporated in Eindhoven and named the most promising socially impactful start-up via the Dutch New Venture award, backed by McKinsey & Co.
Switches university advertising to a performance / results-based recruitment model.
Wins the FD Gazellen Award and ranks in Deloitte's Fast50 BENELUX and Fast500 EMEA.
Launches ACT to turn student-demand data into consulting and analytics; starts the Global Study Awards.
Raises about €5 million from Keen Venture Partners and VOC Capital Partners to expand globally.
Launches an AWS-built generative-AI advisor guiding students in more than 20 languages.
Buys the Amsterdam student-life platform to enrich the pre-application journey.
Leads the company from Eindhoven and has been its public face since the ESTIEM days, championing "study choice transparency" as both a product goal and a mission.
Personally built the first version of Mastersportal and still oversees the technology behind all of Studyportals' portals and infrastructure.
The team - reported at roughly 180 to 300 people over recent years - spans 35+ nationalities, which for a company building products for students in 110+ countries is less a diversity statistic than a product requirement. Its five stated values run from "make the world better" to "balance fun with impact."
A few starting points on YouTube - from the AI advisor to the people behind the platform.
It runs global portals - Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal, PhDportal, Scholarshipportal and more - that let students search, compare and review study programs worldwide, and it helps universities recruit international students using that demand data.
Yes. Search, comparison, reviews and the AI advisor are free for students. Revenue comes from universities via recruitment, analytics and consulting.
Founded in 2009 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, by Edwin van Rest (CEO) and Thijs Putman (CTO), growing out of the 2007 Mastersportal project.
Sophia is Studyportals' AI Student Advisor, co-developed with AWS and launched in 2024, guiding students on programs, countries and scholarships in 20+ languages.
It lists 240,000+ English-taught programs from 3,500+ institutions across 110+ countries and draws roughly 40-55 million student visitors a year.