Clozemaster vs Verbamor: a stranger's sentences or your own words

Everything about Clozemaster below comes from its own homepage, FAQ and Pro page, read on 13 October 2026. Each claim is quoted or linked, so you can check it in a minute.

I build Verbamor, so I'm not neutral. I'll say where Clozemaster is the better pick, and for a lot of readers it is.

How Clozemaster works

Clozemaster is a game of fill-in-the-blank sentences. Its homepage promises "Thousands of fill-in-the-blank sentences in 50+ languages", with "Over 170 language pairings available." It says it aims to answer one question: "What should I do after Duolingo?"

Each round shows you a real sentence with one word missing. You pick the answer from a few choices, or type it yourself for a harder round.

The sentences come from Tatoeba. Clozemaster's FAQ says "All sentences and translations are from Tatoeba's massive and awesome dataset, released under a CC-BY License." Tatoeba is a public, volunteer-built collection of sentences and translations.

Clozemaster picks the blank by rule. It checks every word in a sentence against a frequency list of the language's 10,000 most common words, from Wiktionary. It blanks the least common of those words. The FAQ calls that "the most difficult of the most common."

There's more on top. In some languages, a Fluency Fast Track orders 10,000 sentences into 10 levels, roughly by word frequency. A listening mode plays the sentence before you see it, in French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish among others. And some sentences carry "an explanation from ChatGPT", in the FAQ's words.

How Verbamor works

Verbamor builds its cards from what you meet. You record a lesson with your tutor, and it pulls the words and phrases worth keeping out of the transcript. Or you type a phrase into the Translate tab and save it.

Each card holds an example sentence, an image, and two recordings of the sentence. The front plays it with your word swapped for a tone, so you hear the gap and say the word. The back plays the full sentence. The voices are generated with a native accent.

You grade yourself with four buttons: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. FSRS, an open-source scheduler, uses that grade and the card's history to set the day it comes back. There's also a starter deck of about 650 common words in each of the 5 languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.

Where Clozemaster wins, plainly

I'd rather put this near the top than under a feature table.

Pick Clozemaster if you want it free. The homepage says "Everything you need to get fluent faster is free and always will be." Verbamor has no free tier at all.

Pick Clozemaster if you learn anything outside my 5 languages. It covers 50+ languages, across more than 170 language pairings. Verbamor does Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, with menus in English.

Pick Clozemaster for volume. Thousands of sentences, sorted by frequency, ready on day one. If you read at an intermediate level and want hours of practice with no setup, nothing I sell matches that.

Pick Clozemaster if you're on Android or a laptop. It runs on the web, iOS and Android. Verbamor is iPhone and iPad only.

A fixed ladder against a per-card schedule

Clozemaster schedules every sentence on the same ladder. Its FAQ gives the steps: 1 day, 10 days, 30 days, then 180 days, with mastery going 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. "If a sentence is answered incorrectly at any point, it goes back to 0% mastered."

Pro subscribers can change those intervals. Still, it's one ladder for every sentence: a hard sentence and an easy one climb the same steps.

FSRS works per card. It models how stable each card is in your memory and how hard it is, and sets the next date from your grades. A card you keep nailing drifts out to long gaps. A card you keep missing stays close.

Fixed ladders work, to be fair. A paper Leitner box is a fixed ladder and people have learned languages with one for decades. The cost shows up at scale: one miss on a 180-day sentence sends it back to 0%, however well you knew it the 4 times before. My spaced repetition guide compares the main schedulers in more detail.

Whose words you study

Clozemaster's sentences were written by strangers. That's its strength, because there are thousands, and its limit, because none of them is from your week. Its FAQ is honest about quality too: the data is "user curated", so "there will probably be a few errors here and there."

Verbamor's words come from your own lessons and the phrases you chose to translate. A word your tutor corrected on Tuesday comes with a memory of Tuesday.

The sentence around each word is a different story. Verbamor writes it with an AI model, so it makes mistakes too. The trade is fewer words, all from your own week, against thousands of sentences from everyone else's.

The comparison, side by side

Is Clozemaster free?

Yes, to play. The FAQ answers "How much does Clozemaster cost?" with "Nada. It's free to sign up and play, and always will be."

Clozemaster Pro is the paid tier. Its page lists "Unlimited access to thousands of sentences", listening practice on some collections, custom intervals, automatic Google translations, more stats and offline play. The word "unlimited" suggests the free tier has a cap somewhere, but I couldn't find one stated. I don't quote Clozemaster's Pro price on this site, so check it on clozemaster.com in your region.

Verbamor costs US$19.99 a month, or US$129.99 a year, which is about $10.83 a month. Only the yearly plan has the 7-day trial. Those are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026.

Which one you should pick

Pick Clozemaster if you want free sentence practice, or you learn a language outside these 5. It's also the pick on Android or a laptop, and for thousands of intermediate sentences with no setup.

Pick Verbamor if you take lessons or talk with someone in one of its 5 languages, on an iPhone or iPad. It's for the words from those lessons that keep slipping away by the next one.

Plenty of people would do well running both. Clozemaster for reading volume, Verbamor for the words from your own week.

Questions people actually ask

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