Features & tools
Motley is built around three questions every NYC family asks: where should we live, which school is right, and is it safe? This page is the tour. Everything below is free — the tools that go deeper are part of Motley Pro and have their own guides at the bottom.
Neighborhood rankings
NYC’s residential neighborhoods, ranked by what matters to your family. On Neighborhoods, the Best fit sort weighs the seven neighborhood scores — safety, schools, affordability, transit, how many families live there, neighborhood character, and air quality and child health — by your own weights. It starts from your saved profile (or our defaults if you haven’t set one), and you can put the scores in your own order right there. The search box takes a name, a nickname (“Bed-Stuy”), or what you want (“near the water”), and you can filter by safety, transit, schools, and rent or home price. Open any neighborhood for safety, schools, affordability, parks, who your neighbors would be, housing, and the trade-offs that don’t fit in a number. Each neighborhood page carries a map of the schools inside it; on a phone it’s behind the rose Mapbutton in the lower-right corner, so it’s reachable wherever you’ve scrolled to.
School & early-education search
Search and filter across public, charter, and private schools on Schools, by name (misspellings included) or by what you want: “Spanish dual language,” “Montessori-style,” “a strong music program.” The same page has an Early Education toggle for 3-K, Pre-K, and NYCEEC programs, also reachable directly at Early Education. Every school page covers ratings, programs, admissions method and what it asks of a family, how the school compares to its district, and — for charters — live enrollment status and the application deadline when we have it.
Districts
Districtscovers all 32 Community School Districts: what’s in each one, the neighborhoods it spans, and counts for zoned, charter, private, and early-education seats. If your home address is saved, your own district is highlighted, and the district page shows your zoned school.
Compare, head to head
Compareputs two schools or two neighborhoods side by side on the numbers families actually weigh — ratings, test results, class size, diversity, and cost. Useful for the moment you’re down to two options and going in circles.
Best-of lists
Best schools ranks schools by neighborhood, district, or borough for each grade band. Best neighborhoods ranks neighborhoods citywide or per borough across seven different lenses — families, safety, affordability, schools, transit, things to do, and health. These are our rankings, not yours; for neighborhoods ranked by your own weights, use the Best fit sort on Neighborhoods, and for schools ranked to your child, Smart Match (Motley Pro).
How NYC admissions works
Admission methods is our free reference for the system itself: every entry point from 3-K through high school, every method (SHSAT, audition, screened, Ed-Opt, zoned, charter lottery), what each one actually requires, when its window usually opens, and which programs use it.
Your family’s read on a neighborhood
On any neighborhood page, Analyze for My Familywrites your family’s read: a verdict, and a fit for each topic (safety, schools, affordability, and more) against yourprofile. It’s free, it’s saved under Saved → Analyses, and Intelligence can run it for you too.
Saving your research
Save any school, early-education program, neighborhood, or place as you browse, then find it all in one place at Saved— separate tabs for schools, early ed, places, your analyses, and your Smart Match results, the first three beside a map of what you’ve kept.
Use Motley from your own assistant
We run a public MCP server, so you can point Claude, ChatGPT (Motley NYC is in its plugin directory) or another MCP-capable assistant at Motley and ask about neighborhoods, schools, and admissions from wherever you already work. It’s free, needs no key, and the setup is one URL — see the MCP page. (This is separate from the Intelligence built into Motley, which knows your family.)
Going deeper
The rest of Motley has its own guides: Intelligence, admissions tracking and deadlines, monitors and saved places, and Smart Match, lottery odds, and reports. For what’s free and what Pro adds, see the pricing page.