Apps like Duolingo

Duolingo's own Google Play description calls it the free app for learning 40 or more languages, and that is the part the alternatives have to answer. Across the six apps below, the word free covers four different things. It can mean a course you can finish, a course with pieces withheld, a fourteen-day trial, or a program that is free on every platform except one. They are not the same offer, and the listings do not sort them for you.

What free buys on each listing

Google Play's badge line is the quickest read here, because an app with no free tier has nothing to show an advertisement to. Three of these carry a Contains ads badge; three carry an In-app purchases badge alone; one carries neither.

What each one charges, and where it says so

We read every figure below on 23 September 2026, once at the company's own checkout and again in the In-App Purchases row of its App Store listing. Memrise and Busuu were read again on 3 November 2026, and Memrise's row shows that day's prices. That row expands to show up to ten items with prices. No Google Play listing on this page has an in-app items and offers section under either of its two headings, so the Play column holds only a badge.

The two columns nearly agree, and the gaps are where it gets useful. Babbel's Lifetime plan at $299.99 is on its price page and on neither store. Rosetta Stone's $159 year is on its price page and not in Apple's list. On both apps the cheaper long-run option is the one a store shopper never sees. One derived figure, from Babbel's own two prices: at $299.99 against $107.40 a year, Lifetime costs less than renewing after about two years and ten months.

Apple lists prices, and only Mango lists products

An App Store in-app purchase list gives amounts with no billing period, no feature description and no claim to be complete. Busuu's shows it best. Its ten items include “12 Months Premium” four times, three at $138.99 and one at $70.00. There is also “Monthly Subscription” at both $9.99 and $6.99, and a “14 Day Trial - Premium Plus” priced at $89.99. Busuu's own site sells Premium for a year at $72.99, which is not any of those numbers.

Mango is the counter-example, and that was Mango's choice. Its list is four items long: Individual Plan (Monthly) $13.99, Family Plan (Monthly) $19.99, Individual Plan (Yearly) $119.99, Family Plan (Yearly) $149.99. Each names its billing period, each matches a plan on mangolanguages.com, and there are exactly as many as Mango sells. Any publisher here could have done that.

The Memrise clock came and went

On 23 September 2026 Memrise's plans page carried a banner reading FLASH SALE ENDS IN, above a lifetime price of $99.00 struck through from $329.99. Loaded three times in a row it read 57:12, then 57:11, then 57:12. It counted down while the page sat open and began again when the page was loaded again.

On 3 November the banner was gone, on two loads, and lifetime was back to $329.99. The discount moved to the annual plan instead: $61.99, shown as “SAVE 79%” against a struck-through $299.88. That figure is the $24.99 monthly price times twelve, which nobody pays for a year.

Apple's list explains both. It carries Lifetime Plan at $329.99 and Lifetime Plan Offer at $131.99 (it was $98.99 in September) as two standing items, and the annual at $61.99 under three different names. The prices are products in a catalog, and the sale is a choice of which one the page shows you.

The cheapest route is a library card

Mango says so on its own listings. The App Store and Google Play descriptions both say you can find free access through a subscribing organization like a public library, or subscribe with a 14-day free trial. mangolanguages.com/find-mango is a search tool headed “Your library card may provide free access to Mango”. Against a list price of $119.99 a year, a card that works is the largest saving on this page. It is also the one route no affiliate list mentions, because a library card pays nobody a commission.

What a card gets you is the full course: Mango's library page describes remote access for every cardholder at once, across 70-plus languages. The lookup tells you whether your library is one of them.

Anki charges once, and only on the iPhone

AnkiMobile costs $24.99 and its App Store page carries no In-App Purchases row at all. The description says where the money goes: the purchase “directly supports the open-source project that keeps Anki desktop free for everyone”. The desktop version is free on Windows, macOS and Linux, and AnkiWeb sync between them is free. AnkiDroid carries neither badge. It is published on Google Play by the AnkiDroid Open Source Team, with 4.7 stars across 168,000 reviews and 10 million-plus downloads, read on 3 November 2026.

It is also the only thing here that is not a language course. Anki schedules flashcards; somebody still has to write the Spanish on them, or find a deck that somebody else wrote. That costs effort instead of money, and it is why Anki sits at the end of this list.

The data price is itemized where the money price is not

Apple's App Privacy panel is broken down by category, which no in-app purchase list is, and it separates these apps more sharply than the money does. Busuu and Memrise each declare data used to track you across other companies' apps — Identifiers and Usage Data for Busuu, Identifiers for Memrise. Rosetta Stone Sapphire declares none. AnkiMobile declares none, and the rest of its panel is Contact Info, User Content and Diagnostics. Every one of these is the developer's own declaration. Nobody audits them, so they show what a publisher is willing to state. Google's data safety pages for these apps were not read for this page, and a data safety page has contradicted an App Privacy panel before.

What these do better than ours

Every app above teaches a language, and ours does not. Duolingo's free tier is a larger free product than anything we ship. Babbel prints a footnote explaining that its 50% is measured against twelve months of the one-month plan. Anki's scheduler is a long-running open-source project with a free Android client maintained by volunteers. Mango publishes the route that costs it a subscription. Rosetta Stone still sells a single language outright, at $199.99 for five levels of Latin American Spanish. No other offer here is neither a rental nor a bundle of everything.

Ours is on this page only as a disclosure. If you want to learn Spanish, nothing we make will help.