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 a course you can finish, a course with pieces withheld, a fourteen-day trial, a money-back window, and 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

Every figure below was read on 23 September 2026 at the company's own checkout and again in the In-App Purchases row of its App Store listing, which expands to show up to ten items with prices. No Google Play listing on this page carries an in-app items and offers section under either of that section's two headings, so the Play column has nothing in it but a badge.

Two columns that nearly agree are more useful than one. Babbel's Lifetime plan at $299.99 is on its price page and on neither store, and 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. Derived from Babbel's own two figures and labeled as derived: $299.99 against $107.40 a year is about two years and ten months before Lifetime costs less than renewing.

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, and Busuu's is the clearest demonstration available. Its ten items include “12 Months Premium” four times — three at $138.99 and one at $70.00 — alongside “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 it is a developer choice rather than a store feature. 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 restarts

Memrise's plans page carries 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 on 23 September 2026 it read 57:12, then 57:11, then 57:12, with the same three prices underneath each time. It counts down while the page sits open and begins again when the page is loaded again.

Apple's list settles what that means without anyone having to guess. It carries Lifetime Plan at $329.99 and Lifetime Plan Offer at $98.99 as two separate standing items, with a third at $131.99, and the annual at $61.99 the site also presents as discounted. Both ends of the 70% are ordinary products in the catalog. The prices are what they are, and the hour is decoration.

The cheapest route is a library card

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

What a card gets you is a real course rather than a sampler: Mango's library page describes remote access for every cardholder at once, across 70-plus languages. Whether your library is one of them is the whole question, which is why the lookup exists.

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: sales of the app support development of both the computer and mobile version, which is why it is priced as a computer application. The desktop version is free on Windows, macOS and Linux, AnkiWeb sync between them is free, and AnkiDroid — published on Google Play by the AnkiDroid Open Source Team, 4.8 stars across 165,000 reviews, 10 million-plus downloads — carries neither badge.

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 is a genuine cost, paid in effort instead of money, and it is why Anki is at the end of this list rather than the top of it.

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 a developer's own declaration rather than an audit, so it is evidence of what a publisher is willing to state and not a measurement. 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

All of it, on the only axis that matters here: 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, which is a company showing its working. 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, which is the only offer here that is neither a rental nor a bundle of everything.

Ours belongs in this conversation only as a disclosure. If the goal is to learn Spanish, none of what we make is an answer, and a page that pretended otherwise would not be worth the reading.