Babbel is the grown-up course app — dialogue-first lessons written by linguists.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Babbel | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live conversation | ✓ | ✗ |
| Real-time speech-to-speech | ✓ | ✗ |
| Interrupt mid-sentence | ✓ | ✗ |
| Slang dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Speaking-speed dial | ✓four steps | ✗slow-replay only |
| Patience dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Corrections dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Immersion dial | ✓five steps | ✗ |
| Change the dials mid-call | ✓ | ✗ |
| Partners you invent | ✓ | ✗ |
| Scenarios you write | ✓ | ✗ |
| Level from a spoken call | ✓from a 5-minute call | ✗course placement test |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓vocabulary review |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓ |
| Languages | 20+ | 14 |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android, web · offline |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $17.99/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Babbel does 2.
✓ yes ~ partly ✗ no
* Roadmap, not a shipped feature — and scored as a loss for us until it ships. If a date slips we will change this line rather than quietly leave it up.
Babbel teaches properly and we do not teach at all. It also never once makes you improvise under time pressure, which is the only thing Saygood does.
The dialogues are chosen, sequenced and revisited on purpose by people who study how languages are acquired. For your first few hundred words it is the right tool.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It runs offline, on Android, web and iPad, and its single-language annual is less than half our price.
you are at the beginning and want to be taught properly, or you learn on a commute with no signal.
you have been taught properly already and no lesson has ever made you improvise.
A course is a good way to get your first few hundred words. The mistake is staying there for two years. Speaking is a separate skill from recognising, it is the slowest one to build, and the only way to build it is to talk to someone who is not waiting for you — as early as you possibly can.
I speak five languages and I have tried more or less everything under the sun to learn them — courses, flashcards, tutors, every app in this comparison set that I could get my hands on. The gap that never got closed by any of it was the same one every time: actually speaking, in real time, to someone who is not waiting for you. That is the only reason Saygood exists.
No. Babbel Live has been discontinued — Babbel's own help centre carries a section confirming it. If you came to Babbel specifically for the human group classes, that is no longer on offer, and it is the main reason people have been looking for an alternative this year.
No. Babbel uses speech recognition to check whether you said the expected line correctly. That is useful for pronunciation and for building confidence with set phrases, but there is no conversation happening — nothing is responding to the content of what you said, and nothing can be surprised by it.
Babbel first, but not for as long as you think. If you do not yet have words, an open-ended conversation is a frustrating place to start. The moment you can put a sentence together, start having calls alongside the lessons — speaking takes far longer to build than vocabulary does, so it should start earlier than feels comfortable.
Because every minute you spend on a Saygood call costs us money for as long as you are talking, and a lesson screen does not. Our annual works out around $17/month, which is still more than Babbel's single-language plan. If price is the deciding factor, Babbel wins and we would rather say so than bury it.
Not today, and that is the honest answer — you open the app, pick someone, and talk. One is in build, and it is deliberately not another course: rather than a library of lessons, it works out what you can and cannot say from the calls you have already had, and steers the next conversation toward the gap without ever showing you a lesson screen. The first piece — a spoken level taken from a real five-minute conversation instead of a multiple-choice quiz — is due in August 2026. If that date moves, this page moves with it.
Yes, and it is the single most underrated thing in the app. Slang is a dial in Saygood — mostly clean, everyday, street, full slang — and you can move it in the middle of a call, along with speaking speed, how patient they are, and how hard they correct you. Courses teach the careful, neutral, written register almost exclusively, and that is not the register anybody speaks to you in. Learning only that version of a language is how people end up fluent on paper and lost in a bar.
Ten minutes of calling, free, no card. That is enough to find out whether talking to an AI partner does anything for you.