Busuu is the app for people who want a certificate at the end — CEFR-aligned courses with corrections from a real community.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App StoreBusuu is the most academically serious app in this comparison. Its courses are mapped to CEFR levels, it offers recognised certification, and its community feature gets your written and spoken exercises corrected by actual native speakers for free. If you need to prove a level to an employer or a university, that is a category of value Saygood does not attempt at all. Busuu's speaking practice is exercise-shaped rather than conversational. Saygood is a live call with no syllabus, no level and no certificate.
| Saygood | Busuu | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live voice conversation | Yes — the call is the whole product | No — recorded speaking exercises, corrected by the community |
| How the voice actually works | Live speech-to-speech, no transcribe-then-reply step | You record, humans review later |
| Can you interrupt mid-sentence? | Yes, either direction | Not applicable |
| Structured course / syllabus | No syllabus. You talk, then get a recap | CEFR-aligned, with certification |
| Languages | 20+ | 14 |
| Real human partners or tutors | No — every partner is AI | Yes — community corrections from native speakers |
| Works offline | No | Yes on paid tiers |
| Platforms | iPhone only | iPhone, iPad, Android, web |
| Free tier | 10 minutes of calling, total | Limited course access |
| Monthly (iOS) | $29.99 | $23.49 |
| Annual (iOS) | $199.99 (~$17/mo) | $138.99 |
Saygood is better here Busuu is better here About the same
Putting this second, before the part where we argue for ourselves, is deliberate. Every comparison page on the internet written by a company about its competitors is a page where that company wins every row, and you already know to discount those. So here is the honest list first.
If you need a documented CEFR level, Busuu is one of very few consumer apps that will get you there. Nothing in Saygood produces evidence of anything.
The community review loop is genuinely one of the best features in the category and it costs nothing.
A level-mapped course is a real advantage over an app that just starts a conversation and hopes.
$23.49/mo and $138.99/yr against our $29.99 and $199.99, and it runs everywhere.
One thing, really. When you speak to a Saygood partner, your voice goes to the model as voice and comes back as voice, live — there is no step in the middle where your sentence is turned into text, answered as text, and read back to you. That sounds like an implementation detail and it is the entire product, because it is what decides whether the pause after you stop talking feels like a person thinking or like a machine processing.
It is also the difference between a conversation you can interrupt and one you cannot. Real conversations are full of overlap — you start answering before the other person finishes, they cut in when they realise what you are asking, someone says wait, no, I meant halfway through your own sentence. Practising without any of that is practising a version of speaking that does not exist outside of apps. It is why people finish a course, land in the country, and find that the first real exchange goes nothing like the ones they rehearsed.
The rest of Saygood exists to keep you on the call: partners with a city, a job and opinions rather than a neutral tutor voice; dials for how much they correct you, how much slang they use and how long they wait before jumping in; a recap afterwards of the two or three things worth fixing. But the call is the product, and everything above is in service of you staying on it for ten minutes instead of two.
you need a certificate or a documented level, you want structure mapped to CEFR, or you want your work checked by real people.
you have the level on paper and cannot produce it out loud in real time — which is an extremely common place to be, and not one a course is designed to fix.
And if the honest answer is both — which it often is — the sequence that works is the boring one: learn the words somewhere with a syllabus, then come and try to use them somewhere that will not wait for you.
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, using both is sensible: Busuu for the syllabus, Saygood for the specific experience of speaking under time pressure to someone who answers unpredictably.
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.
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