Busuu is the app for people who want a certificate at the end — CEFR courses, corrections from real people.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Busuu | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | ✓ | ~humans, when they get to it |
| 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 | ✓CEFR, with certification |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓CEFR, with certification |
| Languages | 20+ | 14 |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android, web · offline |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $23.49/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Busuu does 3, plus 1 in part.
✓ 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.
Busuu gets you a documented CEFR level and free corrections from real native speakers. Nothing in Saygood produces evidence of anything — it produces the ability to talk at speed, which the certificate does not.
If you need a documented level, Busuu is one of very few consumer apps that will get you there, and its free community review loop is one of the best features in this whole category.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is cheaper than us, it runs on Android, web and iPad, and it works offline.
you need a certificate, structure mapped to CEFR, or your work checked by real people.
you have the level on paper and cannot produce it out loud in real time.
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.
It offers CEFR-aligned certification through the app, which is meaningful in a way that most app 'levels' are not. Whether a specific employer or institution accepts it is their call, so check before relying on it.
Not in the live sense. You complete speaking exercises which native speakers in the community then review. That feedback is high quality — it just arrives later, and nothing is talking back to you in the moment.
Busuu, unless the exam has a live spoken component you are worried about. If it does, use both: Busuu for the syllabus, Saygood for the specific experience of speaking under time pressure to someone who answers unpredictably — and turn the patience dial down as the date gets closer.
Live voice has a per-minute cost that course content does not. We think the honest framing is that we are a narrow, expensive tool for one specific problem, not a better version of a course app.
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.