Babbel vs. Duolingo: Which language app is best? (2024)

The rise of interactive apps has completely changed the way we learn languages. If you’re interested in languages, a few are probably sitting dormant on your phone right now. The big question is: are they effective learning tools? And if so, which one is best?

We decided to put two of the biggest names in the industry head-to-head: Babbel vs. Duolingo.

These popular language apps are a useful way to explore a new language. But it’s important to note that they work best when combined with more structured learning methods, like private tutoring. These approaches are more personalized and comprehensive, and you will learn all of the essential language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. This will help you make progress toward fluency much faster than studying on your own with apps.

Comparison table of Babbel vs. Duolingo

Babbel review

What is Babbel?

• Best use cases: Following a more structured curriculum tailored to your native language
• Pricing:
  • $66.90 for 6 months
  • $89.40 for 12 months
  • $349 for lifetime access to all languages
• Free trial: Free first lesson
• Average rating: 4.7/5 stars
• Number of languages offered: 14
• Available on web, iOS, and Android

Babbel claims to be the world’s first language-learning app. It was founded in 2007, when smartphones were only just beginning to enter the mainstream. Babbel hasn’t quite reached the same level of internet royalty as Duolingo, but it is a household name nonetheless.

Babbel is the best language app for:

• Basic to intermediate-level learners of Spanish, French, or English
• People who have already learned another language
• Students who like a learning experience that follows logical patterns and rules
• Language learners looking for a resource to supplement language classes

As of 2024, Babbel offers courses in 14 languages. While this is much less than Duolingo, Babbel’s curriculum is far more extensive, so you’ll definitely get quality over quantity. Here’s the full list of available languages:

• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Italian Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Russian
• Spanish (European/Castilian)
• Spanish (Latin American and Mexican)
• Swedish
• Turkish

It’s important to note that while Babbel has courses for all of these languages, the Spanish, French, and English curriculums are the most comprehensive.

How does Babbel work?

Pay right away

Babbel’s signup process is pretty much the same as Duolingo’s. Select your language, your reason for studying, and how much time you would like to learn every day.

Since Babbel is so often seen as an alternative to Duolingo, it’s surprising how little content is offered for free. New users can try one lesson and then — bam! Paywall!

However, there are probably benefits to parting with your money early on in the process. If you’ve paid for Babbel, the motivation to take it seriously comes from something more dignified than an invasive amount of notifications.

Complete short but focused lessons

Babbel’s lessons take between 10 and 20 minutes to complete since their research has found this to be an effective time frame for concentrating on new information.

As a general rule, Babbel asks you to type your answers a lot more than Duolingo does. This doesn’t sound like a large distinction to make, but this alone makes their courses a lot more rigorous. Being able to type a word from memory is a little closer to being able to produce it in real life.

Learn formal grammar rules

Babbel introduces you to grammatical structures in a much more systematic way than Duolingo does. That’s not to say that lessons are dry – these rules are introduced naturally.

First, you memorize a handful of sentences, then you see them in a dialogue. When you are finally shown the rules that underpin the grammar and get to try these rules out, there’s sometimes an “aha!” moment when you notice what’s going on before Babbel explains it.

That said, after you’ve completed a 20-minute lesson, there’s nothing to stop you from forgetting about your grammatical epiphany. To avoid that, copy Babbel’s explanations out by hand in a notebook, the old-fashioned way, for better retention.

Review your mistakes

If you’ve got something wrong, you can go back and correct it as many times as you need. Most learners really benefit from going back over their mistakes, so being empowered with unlimited guesses gives Babbel an edge over Duolingo.

Practice with flashcards

Unlike Duolingo, Babbel helps you memorize phrases and sentences as well as individual words. Learning sentences can be helpful for when you start to speak a new language since coming up with whole sentences from scratch can be really difficult. If you know some full sentences, you already have a few templates to work with, so you can just adapt them to fit different situations.

Babbel’s flashcards feature also makes use of a memory trick called spaced repetition. That means that the app shows you flashcards at intervals that are spaced out to transfer vocabulary into your long-term memory. It relies on you using the feature regularly, but it is a scientifically verified approach!

Choose what you learn

One very user-friendly touch is that buying a Babbel subscription unlocks all lessons for your target language at once. With Duolingo, it sometimes feels like you’re working through the course without any control. There’s no way to skip a section that doesn’t interest you, and you have to complete the whole course in order to keep progressing.

With Babbel, beginners can skip ahead to intermediate lessons or go back to novice lessons. There are also smaller modules on sets of vocabulary, like work or travel, independent of Babbel’s main “Beginner, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, Advanced” progress path.

This empowering approach is great for independent learners who want more control over their journey to fluency. It’s also helpful for those who are using Babbel alongside another learning method, like traditional lessons or 1-on-1 online tutoring.

Improve your pronunciation

With Babbel, you can record yourself speaking and get feedback on your pronunciation. The app’s built-in speech recognition technology uses advanced algorithms to analyze your speech and compare it to that of a native speaker.

Then you’ll get immediate feedback on your pronunciation, which highlights any specific words or sounds you didn’t pronounce correctly. Babbel highlights the words or phrases you mispronounced and plays the correct pronunciation for comparison. Depending on your mistake, you might also get tips on how to position your tongue or shape your mouth to make the right sound.

This feature is a powerful tool for independent learners who can’t regularly get feedback from native speakers. The chance to repeat the exercises until you nail the pronunciation will help you build confidence in your speaking skills – one of the biggest challenges in learning a new language. However, it’s important to remember that talking with native speakers or getting direct feedback in 1-on-1 tutoring will always be the best way to learn proper pronunciation.

Pros and cons of Babbel

Pros

• Grammar is taught well: Babbel’s explanations of new rules are thorough and helpful at every level, particularly for grammar.
• It’s a good mix of fun and education: Babbel strikes a good balance between the fun of Duolingo and the intensity of a language course.
• You don’t have to be a beginner: Unlike Duolingo, Babbel will still be helpful to language learners who have progressed beyond the very first steps of their journey. If you’re at intermediate or advanced level, there are still difficult grammatical rules that can be effectively taught through Babbel’s characteristic bite-sized lessons.
• The notifications aren’t overwhelming: The notifications you get from this app are motivating without being over the top. You can set when you would like to be reminded to study or even turn off reminders. It feels like Babbel is rooting for you rather than chasing you down the corridor.
• You can learn from your mistakes: On the desktop version of the app, users can correct their mistakes at the end of a lesson or after running their flashcards. This is a great feature since most people learn fastest by seeing where they have gone wrong.

Cons

• The mobile app is a little glitchy: Babbel probably isn’t for you if you want an app to help you learn a language on your phone. On mobile, you can’t correct your mistakes, which means you can easily just complete lessons without really absorbing any new rules.
• Not everyone loves grammar: For those who speak only one language, the focus on grammar can be quite frustrating. If you don’t know the difference between a “conditional clause” and an “indefinite article,” you’ll have to open a lot of tabs to look these up as you go along. In comparison, 1-on-1 tutoring offers more structured learning for all the skills you need to master a new language, especially speaking and listening.
• It’s not great for learning multiple languages: If you’re the kind of student who flirts with multiple languages at once, Babbel will get expensive fast. Each new language requires an extra subscription fee. Another downside for the polyglots: Babbel currently only offers 14 different languages, almost all of them European. What’s more, some language courses are more developed than others.
• It’s expensive: Babbel is quite expensive for a subscription to a desktop program, especially if you choose to be billed monthly. There are so many great resources for learning a language online. It’s smartest to invest in parts of language learning that you really need another human’s help with, such as speaking practice.
• It’s a little boring: For some people, the gamification of language apps is a real selling point. Although Babbel does provide interactive exercises and flashcards, it’s not necessarily designed to be entertaining. This can make it hard to stay motivated to keep using the app. In contrast, a private tutor can personalize your lessons to your learning style to keep you engaged.

You might also be interested in Preply vs Italki – Find out which language learning site is right for you!

Duolingo review

What is Duolingo?

• Best use cases: Building a consistent daily study habit
• Pricing:
  • Free access to some features
  • $12.99/month
  • $83.99/year ($6.99/month)
• Free trial: 14-day free trial
• Average rating: 4.7/5 stars
• Number of languages offered: 39
• Available on web, iOS, and Android

Duolingo claims to be the most downloaded language-learning app in the world, almost without any competition. As of 2023, it has 500 million users – more than the population of the United States!

In many ways, Duolingo is so ingrained in popular culture that it has become more than a gamified language app. It’s referenced in TV shows and used in schools. Duo, Duolingo’s owl mascot, has even sparked a series of memes.
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Duolingo works best for:

• True novices
• People learning basic words before a vacation
• Language learners who want to set a daily learning habit
• Polyglots who study multiple languages at once
• Students of rare languages or ones that don’t have many tech-based resources
• Kids playing on their parents’ phones!

Of all the apps on the market, Duolingo offers the most languages – 39 in total. It’s famous for including minoritized languages, like Navajo and Hawaiian, which have been marginalized, persecuted, or even banned throughout history. You can also learn fictional languages, like High Valyrian from Game of Thrones and Klingon from Star Trek, or Esperanto, the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world.

As of 2024, you can learn the following languages on Duolingo:

• Arabic (Modern Standard)
• Chinese (Mandarin)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Esperanto
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Haitian Creole
• Hawaiian
• Hebrew
• High Valyrian (fictional)
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Klingon (fictional)
• Korean
• Latin
• Navajo
• Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Scottish Gaelic
• Spanish
• Swahili
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese
• Welsh
• Yiddish
• Zulu

How does Duolingo work?

Set daily goals

Joining Duolingo is very simple. Choose which language you’d like to learn, your motivation for learning, and a daily study goal, from “regular” mode (10 minutes per day) to “intense” (20 minutes per day).

It’s good to build a language learning habit, but don’t fall into the trap of using intense mode. If you’re dedicated enough to spend 20 minutes per day on Duolingo, you’re dedicated enough to try more effective study methods, like online language courses or 1-on-1 tutoring.

Play fun and easy games

Duolingo’s “lessons” are short and satisfying, only five minutes max. The emphasis is on memorizing and translating new sentences. The exercises are often multiple-choice questions, which don’t test your understanding very deeply because you don’t have to recall new vocabulary or produce sentences on your own.

Occasionally, you are asked to type an answer or speak into your phone using (quite glitchy) voice recognition software. Once you’ve completed a set of skills, you’ll unlock new ones, like other topics.

Duolingo Stories is another interactive exercise designed to teach reading and listening skills with narrative stories. This can help you learn new words in context. However, these exercises aren’t available in every language and only come up occasionally as you progress through lessons.

Get hooked fast

The most interesting part of Duolingo is the element of danger involved! Every day, users are given five hearts on the free version. Make a mistake and you’ll lose a heart; lose all your hearts, and you can’t use the app again until the next day. Once you’ve caught the Duolingo bug, this becomes great motivation to stick with it!

Duolingo is nothing if not addictive – Duo has plenty of other tricks to keep you playing, such as:

• Complete a lesson to win “lingots,” or coins to unlock different customizations for the app, such as extra lessons with slang.
• You are automatically entered into a leaderboard with other users of a similar level. Smash the competition after a week, and you’ll graduate to a leaderboard with even more committed users. This can be a real motivator for those with a competitive streak.
• The most persuasive of all is Duolingo’s streak system. Meeting your daily learning goal helps you maintain your streak, which is celebrated throughout the app as the secret to language proficiency.

Don’t expect conjugation tables

Grammar explanations do pop up from time to time, but only in very small doses. If you prefer to learn systematically, the shallowness here might get a little frustrating.

Lessons move on without ever helping you understand why your answers are correct or incorrect. The app will highlight your mistake, but it won’t go into detail about how to fix it, like why you should use a particular verb tense or gender agreement.

Prepare for endless notifications

The amount of emails and notifications this app sends users is way over the top. After a few days of being nagged to maintain your streak, you’ll end up picturing Duo as a passive-aggressive, manipulative character.

Worst of all is the notification if you do not open Duolingo for three or four days in a row. “These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.” Yikes!

When life gets in the way and you don’t use the app for a few days, you feel very discouraged to log back in. Even if you had a streak of 100 days, it’s broken now. You’re back to day zero, a terrible student with nothing to show for your progress. If you don’t commit to using it every day, the psychological tricks can be really discouraging!

Pros and cons of Duolingo

Pros

• It’s addictive: A sustainable learning routine is fundamental for learning a language, so Duolingo is a great way to turn your screen addiction into a virtue.
• You can learn for free: Yes, there are ads, but they aren’t overwhelming.
• It’s better than nothing on busy days: Duolingo is helpful for having some contact with your target language on days when you can’t spare more than five or ten minutes. It works even better when used as daily vocabulary practice in between 1-on-1 tutoring sessions.
• It’s useful for learning basics: Duolingo is great for picking up a few phrases of a language without much effort if you’re going on holiday.
• There are 95 different courses: Duolingo offers nearly a hundred different teaching language/instruction language combinations, so if you don’t know which language to study yet, you’ll be spoiled for choice!

Cons

• It’s only for absolute beginners: Once you’re no longer a complete novice in a language, the app is too simple for you to see real progress. Even after Level A2, which is considered a lower beginner level, Duolingo can no longer help you.
• You learn irrelevant sentences: Sometimes, it feels like you are learning a set of randomly generated sentences rather than useful expressions. For instance, the Italian course trains you to memorize the sentence “la mucca è nel burro,” which means “the cow is in the butter.” You won’t need to use this sentence in any language.
• It’s inefficient: There are more effective ways than Duolingo to learn a language. You can feel this when using the app: lessons aren’t hard, or at least, no harder than Candy Crush. Your brain isn’t doing much work. If you want to learn English online, for example, it doesn’t have to be difficult, but it should feel a little challenging if you want to see any real results.
• It won’t help with your real-world speaking abilities: The main problem with Duolingo is that you could use it for months on end and still barely be able to form a sentence in your target language. It’s fine to get started, but it’s very different from learning to speak a language in real life.
• You might feel a false sense of progress: Duolingo’s emphasis on maintaining a daily learning streak can trick you into thinking you’ve actually learned something. But you probably would have made more progress if you had put the same amount of time as you used Duolingo into reading or listening to your target language. According to polyglot Olly Richards, you need more structure and immersion to learn a language fast, not a 50-day streak.

You might also be interested in Rosetta Stone vs Memrise: Which should you use to learn a language?

Which is better: Babbel or Duolingo?

In our opinion: Babbel. Even with Babbel’s slightly glitchy mobile app, you’ll gain more tangible grammatical, pronunciation, and vocabulary skills by using it than you will by using Duolingo, which will only teach you the most basic vocabulary.

However, Duolingo’s approach seems to be based on the theory that a daily habit of low-intensity, low-effort learning is better than no learning habit at all – which is inarguably true! Plus, it deserves all the praise it receives for making language education accessible to everyone and turning it into a fun game.

Our main takeaway: if you’re only studying with a language learning app, you’re not really learning a language. Both Duolingo and Babbel can be great tools in your toolbox, but neither should be the main focus of your studies.

Babbel and Duolingo encourage students to log in as much as possible because that’s best for the success of the apps. But this isn’t the most efficient way for students to learn because online games are, fundamentally, an unnatural way to interact with a language.

That doesn’t mean you should never use either of these apps. But it’s important to remember that they work best when you combine them with more interactive learning, like language classes or private tutoring, where you talk to real people. As Sylvia Johnson, the Head of Methodology at Preply, explains:

“While language learning apps are a fantastic tool for self-study, they often lack the personalized guidance and interactive feedback you need to learn effectively. In comparison, a private tutor will create a customized learning plan based on your learning style and goals.

“Tutors shape the pedagogical processes that lay the foundation of successful language learning by emphasizing communicative competence and its pragmatics. Their responsibility extends far beyond the mere dispensation of grammar rules and error correction, focusing on personal development, emotional intelligence, and overall growth. Tutors are instrumental in teaching students how to learn effectively and instilling a lifelong passion for learning.”

What is the fastest way to learn a language?

It’s a cliche, but practicing speaking a language is the only way to get good at it. Luckily, it’s never been easier to find native speakers to practice with or more convenient to “meet” them without leaving your home.

Preply has tutors in more than 50 languages offering 1-on-1 lessons over video chat. Private online lessons start from just $5 per hour, so you’ll find a tutor to suit your budget. It’s sensible to invest your language learning budget in the one skill it’s impossible to teach yourself: real conversation practice.

You’ll start by taking a short quiz about your level or proficiency, goals, and schedule, and then Preply will suggest tutors that fit your needs. You can also choose to filter tutors by pricing, country of origin, and specialties. For example, if you want to learn Latin American Spanish for the workplace, you can easily tweak the filters to show you tutors who specialize in that.

Once you choose a tutor, they’ll create a personalized learning plan based on your current level, goals, and interests. Your tutor will adjust your learning plan as you go to help you progress as fast as possible.

You’ll also start speaking on day one, which can help you get comfortable with a foreign language more quickly. And if you aren’t satisfied with your tutor, Preply will replace your tutor up to two times for free.

Online tutors are available in every time zone, so you’re sure to find someone who fits your schedule. Plus, you get to pick when your lessons happen, whether that’s during your lunch break, on the weekend, or any time in between.

This makes it easy to turn learning another language into a regular habit, like working out or meditating. Commit to just a few hours per week, and you’ll be amazed how fast things start to click!