Busuu vs Duolingo: which one you should buy

The answer, before anything else

Find yourself in one of these and stop reading. That's the whole point of putting it here.

You want a daily habit and you're not paying. Duolingo. Its App Store listing says every course is free, and the paid tier mostly buys away ads and the energy limit rather than teaching you more. A free complete course beats a paid one you'll cancel in March.

You want grammar explained and your writing corrected by a person. Busuu. Its community of native speakers marks up what you write, which no scheduler does and no amount of tile-tapping substitutes for. Budget $70 to $139 a year, which I'll break down below.

Your language isn't Spanish, French, German or another of the big ones. Check Busuu's list first, because it's 14 languages and Duolingo advertises 40 or more. If yours isn't on Busuu's list the comparison is already over.

You're past beginner and you stalled because you can't speak. Neither one, and I'd rather say that plainly than sell you something. Both apps show you the sentence before asking you to produce it, so the hard part, dragging a word out of an empty head, never happens. What fixes that is a person who talks back, and then a way to keep what they corrected. More on that further down.

Who wrote this, and what I checked

I make a competing app. It's called Verbamor, it costs money, and it does a much narrower job than either of these. Weigh everything below against that, which is why every number here traces to a page you can open yourself.

I haven't run a 90-day trial of either app. What I did instead: read both companies' own live listings and product pages on 21 September 2026 and quote them. Where a number isn't on a first-party page, it isn't on this page either. You'll notice a couple of places below where I say "I can't confirm that" rather than filling the gap.

That matters more than it sounds. The page ranking second for this query carries a 50% Busuu discount that expired on 1 February 2026, on a page stamped as updated 17 July 2026. A stale offer on a freshly dated page is the exact tell that should make you distrust every other figure on it.

What each one actually costs

Here's the mess a buyer currently walks into. One page quotes Busuu at "$6 to $15 per month," another at "€5.83 / month," a third at "$5,25 a month." Three currencies, five term lengths, no totals. Nobody can compare those, which is convenient if your revenue comes from the click rather than the answer.

So, the actual price points, read off each app's US App Store listing on 21 September 2026. These are the in-app purchases Apple displays, named as each company names them.

Prices checked 21 September 2026, US App Store, US dollars. They differ by region, and the web checkout often differs from the iOS one. Check your own store before you believe any page, including this one.

Now the honest caveat that every competitor skips. Apple's store does not attach a billing term to most of these. Busuu lists eleven in-app purchases and the names repeat: "12 Months Premium" appears four separate times, three of them at $138.99 and one at $70.00, which is what a standing price sitting beside a promotional one looks like. "Monthly Subscription" appears twice, at $9.99 and at $6.99. So I'm not going to hand you a tidy per-month figure derived from a price whose term I can't prove. Anyone who does is guessing and rounding.

What you can take from the table: a year of Busuu is somewhere between $70 and $140 depending which row you land on, a year of Super Duolingo between $84 and $120, and the monthly routes on both are dramatically worse value than the annual ones. The $79.99 "Annual Subscription" row is the one I would guess is the standing Premium price, and guessing is exactly what I said I wouldn't do, so treat the range as the answer and the checkout screen as the authority.

Two facts that materially change the risk, each mentioned by only one of the three ranking pages, so nowhere are they together. Busuu publishes a 14-day money-back guarantee: its own product page says "Cancel within 14 days and get a full refund." And Super Duolingo advertises 14 days free on its App Store listing. Both let you find out before you're committed, and for a purchase this reversible the guarantee is worth more than a $10 price difference.

One number I deliberately left out. A competitor page quotes a Duolingo family plan at under $2 per person per month, and it's probably the cheapest genuine route into Duolingo. I couldn't confirm it on a Duolingo-owned page today, so I'm not publishing it as fact. Worth checking yourself if you have 4 or more people.

Skill by skill

Organising by skill rather than by app is the one structural idea worth borrowing from the current SERP. You already know your own weak spot. Jump to it.

Vocabulary. Both drill it constantly and both do it by recognition. You pick the right tile, or match a word to a picture, and the target is on screen the whole time. That's an easier task than producing the word cold, and the gap between them is where the "I know this word but I can't say it" feeling comes from. Busuu adds Smart Review, which its App Store listing describes as saving the grammar and vocab from your lessons in one place for later review.

Grammar. Busuu wins this one clearly, and it's the most consistent finding across all three pages currently ranking. Busuu explains rules in prose, in your own language. Duolingo mostly makes you infer the rule from examples and offers notes as a side dish. If you're the kind of learner who wants to be told why the subjunctive shows up after ojalá, that preference is decisive and you can stop comparing.

Writing. Busuu, and it isn't close. You write something, real native speakers mark it up, and you correct theirs in return. Duolingo has no equivalent. The variance is the catch, which I'll come back to below.

Reading and listening. The closest match, and the skills both apps genuinely build. This is also where the only decent published evidence lives, which I'll get to in the next section.

Speaking. Both offer microphone exercises. Duolingo's own description of its speaking work has learners repeat after characters and read target sentences aloud, so the sentence you're producing is in front of you when you produce it. That trains pronunciation rather than retrieval. Kang, Gollan and Pashler tested exactly this contrast with 40 Hebrew nouns: learners who tried to produce the word from memory before hearing it beat learners who heard then repeated, on a spoken test 2 days later, with no loss of pronunciation quality. Their test was single words named from pictures, not sentences at conversational speed, so don't stretch it further than that. The direction is clear enough.

What you can do after a year

Every page comparing these two apps compares features. None of them reports an outcome, which is strange, because the outcome is the only thing anybody is actually buying.

Here's the best published result in the category. Jiang, Peters, Plonsky and Pajak studied 245 Duolingo learners who finished the Basic content of an English course, with Duolingo as their only tool, and found they scored Intermediate High on average, above the Intermediate Mid the course targets. Genuinely good, and worth knowing. Two caveats travel with it: 3 of the 4 authors work at Duolingo, and the study measured reading and listening only. No speaking. No writing.

That shape is the honest answer to "what will a year leave me able to do." You'll read menus, follow slow speech, recognise a large vocabulary, and struggle the moment a real person replies at speed. If that sounds like a caricature, it matches the single most common thing learners say about their own streaks.

Duolingo has also moved the ceiling recently, and most pages haven't noticed. On 22 April 2026 it announced its Spanish course now teaches content through CEFR B2, a Duolingo Score of 129, across 9 courses. Any page still repeating the old "Duolingo only gets you to A2" line is out of date. That's a claim about how far the course content reaches, not a measurement of where learners land, and those are different things.

For Busuu I can't offer you an equivalent number, and I want to be exact about why. Busuu has commissioned efficacy research, including a 2025 study of 1,635 participants, but those studies are funded by Busuu and the 2021 one files that funding under its own "Limitations of the Study" section. I read all 16 reports from that research team and wrote up what the funding does to them. Treat both companies' own research as a floor on plausibility rather than a measurement.

How each one fails

Feature lists tell you what an app has. Here's what goes wrong, which is the part you'll actually live with.

Duolingo: the streak becomes the goal. The gamification is genuinely excellent at getting you to open the app, and it's equally good at letting a 400-day streak stand in for progress. A streak measures days attended. Then there's the energy system, which replaced hearts: lessons spend it, correct answers earn it back, and you refill by watching an ad or spending gems. Duolingo doesn't publish the starting amount, so ignore any page that quotes you a number. And the paid tier buys convenience, not teaching, which is fine as long as nobody sold it to you as more.

Busuu: the corrections come from amateurs. The community feedback is the best thing Busuu has and its quality varies, because the people correcting you are other learners writing in their native language for free. One page ranking today reports corrections typically landing in 60 to 90 minutes, which is a useful figure I can't verify on a Busuu page, so weigh it accordingly. The harder limit is the catalogue: 14 languages, named on Busuu's own listing as English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch and Turkish. If yours isn't there, nothing else on this page matters.

Both: recognition dressed as recall. Tapping the right tile from 4 options is a recognition task. Producing the word into silence is a retrieval task, and only the second one builds the memory you need mid-conversation. Karpicke and Roediger's Science study on 40 Swahili-English pairs found items that kept being tested after the first correct answer came back at about 80% a week later, against about 36% for items that were only restudied. Same students, same words, same time. That's the mechanism both apps leave on the table, and it's the whole content of the testing effect.

Which brings me to the one honest paragraph about what I build. Verbamor does none of what these two apps do. It teaches you nothing new, has no course, and won't give you your first thousand words. What it does is record your tutor lesson, pull out the words and phrases you actually got wrong, and turn them into fill-in-the-blank cards with generated native-accent audio, scheduled by FSRS. Five languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. iOS only, $19.99 a month or $129.99 a year, no free tier, 7-day trial on the annual plan. Both are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026; the App Store sets a different number in other countries. It's only worth anything if you're already paying for lessons and watching them fade, and if you're a beginner with no tutor, Duolingo's free course is the better buy and it isn't close.

If you'd rather build the cards yourself, Anki is free on desktop and Android and better than anything I'll ship. The catch there is that you have to keep doing it, and most people stop in week 3.

Questions people actually ask

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Sources

Every load-bearing claim Verbamor makes is traced to its paper on the research page.