Memrise vs Duolingo: which one to pay for

First, the disclosure that should be at the top of every page like this one: I have not used either app. I build a competing product, and I am not going to describe a trial I didn't run or a verdict I reached by feel.

Everything below comes from Memrise's and Duolingo's own pages, quoted, with the date I read them. You can click every source and check me. That is a lower bar than it sounds, and the pages currently ranking for this query clear it about half the time.

The short answer, by who you are

You have one budget and one evening. Here is the ranking before any feature walk, because burying the verdict under 2,000 words of tables is the thing I dislike most about the pages above me.

Starting from zero, no teacher, no course. Duolingo, and pay nothing. The free tier is a full course and it is genuinely free. Exhaust it before you consider a subscription for either app.

You want vocabulary to stick and you already have a source for it. Memrise is built for that job, and its review schedule is published, which I respect. But check the price in the app first, because I cannot quote you one and neither can anybody else.

You hit the free Duolingo tier and it annoyed you. Super Duolingo removes the interruptions and adds no lessons. Worth it if the interruptions are what stopped you, and worth nothing if they weren't.

You already have lessons with a teacher and you keep forgetting them. Neither of these. You need the words that came up in your lesson, and a fixed course cannot know what those were.

Why nobody can tell you what these cost

I went looking for both prices expecting a five-minute job, and found the reason the three pages above this one contradict each other.

Memrise publishes no readable price at all. The URL everyone links to, memrise.com/pricing, returned 404 on 21 September 2026. Memrise's own help centre explains why: you see prices "by tapping the Upgrade button on the Android or iOS app or by visiting memrise.com/premium while logged in on web." Behind a login, per country, by design.

Its US App Store listing does show in-app purchases, including something the comparison pages miss: a "Monthly Language Learning Plan" at $24.99 and a "3-Month Language Learning Plan" at $24.99. Same number, different terms. Ten products, a "Lifetime Plan" at $329.99 and a "Lifetime Plan Offer" at $131.99, and Apple attaches no billing period to any of them.

Hold that against the pages ranking above this one. One says Memrise Pro is $9 a month. One says roughly $120 a year with a $325 lifetime. One says €8.99 a month and €139.99 lifetime. Three currencies, three lifetime figures, no capture date or region on any of them.

Duolingo is the same shape. Super Duolingo appears on its US listing at $9.99, $12.99, $83.99, $95.99 and $119.99, read the same day, with no billing term on any of them. Which is why I won't print "Super Duolingo costs $12.99 a month" the way the other pages do. Apple doesn't say that, and neither does Duolingo.

What I can say without inventing anything: Super Duolingo carries a 14-day free trial, in Duolingo's own words on the listing, "If you like Duolingo, try Super Duolingo for 14 days free!" Memrise's listing states no trial.

So the practical advice is duller than a table and more useful. Open each upgrade screen on your own phone, in your own country, and read what Apple shows you. That's the only price that will be charged to you.

What changed since those comparisons were written

Two of the three pages ranking for this query sell you Memrise on its library of user-created courses. One builds an entire how-to-use-it section around browsing community decks. The other rests its final verdict on it.

That feature is not in the product you would be buying. From Memrise's own help centre: "As of March 31st, 2024, these courses live on a dedicated site - community-courses.memrise.com - and are no longer accessible via memrise.com or our mobile apps."

A second article puts it flatly: "Community courses (also known as user-generated courses) can no longer be accessed in the Memrise app."

So a buyer reading those pages today would subscribe expecting a deck library the app removed over two years ago. If that library is what you actually want, the answer is Anki, free on desktop and Android, with the best shared-deck ecosystem here by a distance.

A smaller staleness marker, handy for dating any page on this topic: if it says "Duolingo Plus", it predates the rename to Super Duolingo. One of the three above me still says Plus and shows no publication date anywhere.

What the two apps are actually for

The feature lists make these sound like competitors doing the same job slightly differently. Naming the split honestly is more useful than a 30-row table.

Duolingo walks you down a fixed path. Somebody decided the order, the sentences and the pace, and your job is to keep going. That structure is the whole value when you're starting cold, because the hardest part of month one is not knowing what to study next.

Memrise drills recall against a published schedule. And I mean published, which is rarer than it should be. Its help centre gives the exact ladder: "4 hours > 12 hours > 24 hours > 6 days > 12 days > 48 days > 96 days > 6 months", and a wrong answer sends an item back to the 4-hour step.

That ladder is Memrise's real differentiator and no comparison page explains it. The intervals are identical for every user and every word: one you find trivial and one you've failed six times climb the same steps. A per-card scheduler like FSRS instead fits its timing to your own review history, which we cover in how FSRS schedules your reviews.

Fixed ladders aren't a scandal. Simple, predictable, and far better than no schedule. They just can't tell your easy words from your hard ones, and over a few thousand items that compounds. We put Memrise's ladder beside the others in the best spaced repetition apps.

What paying actually buys you

The question underneath "which one" is usually "does paying change anything". For Duolingo I can answer it precisely, because Duolingo published the mechanism.

The free tier is paced by Energy, which replaced the old hearts. From Duolingo's own post, dated 3 July 2025: "Each lesson uses a little bit of energy", "You earn energy when you get multiple answers in a row right", and "Energy fully recharges in about a day." Run low and, in their words, "You can always watch a rewarded ad to earn back some Energy, or buy an Energy refill using gems."

Super Duolingo removes the ads and the energy cap, and adds a monthly streak repair. Read that as a list of what it does not do: it adds no lessons and teaches no different content. You are buying the removal of friction the free app added deliberately.

Which makes the decision unusually clean. If you quit lessons because a battery ran out, paying fixes your exact problem. If you quit because the sentences felt pointless, paying changes nothing at all, and I would rather you knew that before the charge lands.

Memrise's paid tier I can describe less precisely, and I'd rather say so than guess. Its help centre states that premium memberships "give you access to all our official language courses (you aren't restricted to one language!)", plus exclusive features it doesn't name on any page I could read without an account. So I am not going to list them for it.

Cancelling, refunds, and what you keep

Not one of the three pages ranking for this query mentions refunds. It's the section I'd want most before spending money.

Memrise publishes a 30-day money-back guarantee, with two conditions that matter more than the headline. From its refund article, updated 7 September 2026: "Refunds on Monthly plans are only available within 14 days of the purchase date." And the one that catches people: "If you subscribed to Memrise via Apple App Store/iTunes (iOS), you will need to get in touch with Apple directly to request a refund."

Read that twice if the guarantee is why you're buying. Most phone users subscribe through the App Store, which is exactly the channel where Memrise hands you to Apple.

On what happens when you stop paying, Memrise is fair: cancel an annual plan 6 months in and "you will still be able to use your membership until the end of the twelfth month." You keep the term you paid for.

One wrinkle before you pick a plan. To switch, its help centre says "you will first have to cancel your current subscription, wait for it to expire and then resubscribe." A monthly plan doesn't upgrade into an annual one, so decide your term up front.

For Duolingo the free tier is the safety net. Cancel Super and you land back on the full course with ads and the battery, keeping your streak and progress, losing only what you were paying to remove.

The ceiling they share

Both apps are decent at getting words into your head. Neither makes you produce a sentence you haven't been shown.

Duolingo describes its own speaking exercises as repeat-the-word items, translate-out-loud items and short spoken dialogues, with a microphone option on many writing exercises. The target sentence is on screen before you speak. That's useful practice for your mouth and it does the retrieval step for you, which is the part that builds memory.

Memrise's ladder tests items it selected, in the direction it selected. Same shape: recognition and prompted recall, not invention.

The gap between recognising a word in a tap-the-tile exercise and producing it mid-sentence with someone waiting is real and well documented. Kang, Gollan and Pashler put it to the test with Hebrew vocabulary: learners who tried to produce a word from memory before hearing it beat learners who just repeated after the recording, on a spoken test two days later, with no loss of pronunciation quality. The caveat travels with the finding, because it matters: that test was naming single pictures, not talking. Nobody has shown that any app closes the gap to conversation.

Which is why the honest version of this comparison ends with neither app. If you want to speak, the thing that trains speaking is speaking to a person, and we wrote about that gap in why a long streak isn't speaking practice.

Side by side

One cell in that table deserves a footnote, since it's the sort of thing other pages state as fact. Duolingo genuinely published a spaced repetition scheduler: half-life regression, in Settles and Meeder's 2016 ACL paper, open-sourced. Whether that is still what runs in the app today is not something Duolingo states anywhere I can find, so I won't claim it either way.

Where this leaves us

I build Verbamor, so here is the one paragraph about it and then I'll stop. It does a different job from both apps on this page: it takes the vocabulary from lessons you're already having with a teacher, and turns it into fill-in-the-blank cards scheduled by FSRS. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. It teaches you nothing new, which is the point, and it has no free tier, which I'd rather say plainly than bury. $19.99 a month or $129.99 a year, with the 7-day trial on the annual plan only. 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. If you don't have lessons, it has nothing to hold, and Duolingo's free course will do more for you this month than we will.

The reason I'd push most readers toward the free tier before any subscription is boring and true: the thing that stops people is not which app they chose. It's the week the lessons stopped and nothing replaced them.

Questions people actually ask

---

Sources

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