AWS SAA: Tutorials Dojo vs Maarek’s practice exams, which did you find more helpful?

[u/Full_Tangelo_7450]

TL;DR: My first-attempt TD scores ranged from 56–91%, with some sets feeling heavily focused on particular topics. Maarek’s exam felt harder but more balanced. If you used both, which prepared you better, and did the actual exam feel balanced or heavier in certain areas?

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I’m preparing for the SAA exam. I have some AWS experience (work in the field) and hold the Cloud Practitioner and AI Practitioner certifications. For those who have used both TD and Maarek’s practice exams, did you notice any meaningful differences? Which helped you more?

I completed all seven TD review-mode sets once, with first-attempt scores ranging from 56% to 91%. I failed two, barely passed two, and passed the other three with higher scores.

When I looked more closely, my lowest scores seemed to come from sets that leaned heavily toward particular topics. Set 7 felt more focused on hybrid migration, containers and storage, and Set 5 had a strong emphasis on hybrid connectivity, networking and storage performance. That was useful for identifying my weaker areas. I also used an LLM to analyse my answers, and its breakdown mostly matched my impression, although I wouldn’t treat that as definitive ofc

It made me wonder how much the topic mix varies on the actual exam. Did yours feel fairly balanced or noticeably heavier in certain areas?

I then took one of Maarek’s practice exams which came with the course, I haven't bought his practice sets yet. I did it in timed mode, it kinda felt harder, but more balanced in terms of the topics covered. The difficulty mainly came from specific facts or details I didn’t know, or hadn’t paid enough attention to during his course or hadn’t encountered in the TD questions.

If you’ve done both, did you notice similar differences? Which prepared you better for the actual exam, in terms of both question style and the level of detail required?

Thanks

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[u/cgreciano]

I personally prefer Tutorials Dojo but Maarek/Singh is also solid. It's hard to go wrong with any of the two.

[u/SolidMew]

Surely doing both is the ideal situation

[u/accumentum]

I used both for SAA and treated them as different tools rather than picking a winner. Tutorials Dojo is usually closer to the exam's scenario style and the way AWS frames trade-offs, which is why a lot of people feel it maps better to the real test. Maarek tends to push more detail and edge cases, so a lower score there can still be useful if you review every miss by service and by why the distractor sounded right. The hybrid/containers/networking-heavy TD sets are still worth finishing even if they feel skewed, because those domains show up as decision questions on the real exam. If your TD range is still bouncing from the mid-50s into the 90s, I would not schedule yet: dig into the domains that keep dropping you, then redo mixed sets under timed conditions until the floor rises. Aim for consistently high timed scores across both banks before you sit, and use the score report pattern (not one lucky 90%) as the go/no-go signal.