Duolingo is the default. 500-million-download scale, a real course, and a speaking feature that is still gated and still push-to-talk.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App StoreIf you are starting from zero and want a structured course that keeps you coming back, Duolingo is still the better tool and it is not close — it has a decade of curriculum design and a gamification loop nobody has matched. If your problem is that you have done the course and still freeze when a human speaks to you, Duolingo cannot fix that, because its only conversational feature (Video Call with Lily) is locked to the Max tier and works by push-to-talk. Saygood is an open-ended live phone call, in 20+ languages, on the main paid tier.
| Saygood | Duolingo | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live voice conversation | Yes — the call is the whole product | Video Call with Lily — Max tier only, and a fixed set of scenarios |
| How the voice actually works | Live speech-to-speech, no transcribe-then-reply step | Push-to-talk: you hold to speak, release, then she replies |
| Can you interrupt mid-sentence? | Yes, either direction | No — turn-based by design |
| Structured course / syllabus | No syllabus. You talk, then get a recap | Best-in-class. A full graded syllabus per language |
| Languages | 20+ | 40+ courses from English |
| Real human partners or tutors | No — every partner is AI | No |
| Works offline | No | Yes, on paid tiers |
| Platforms | iPhone only | iPhone, iPad, Android, web |
| Free tier | 10 minutes of calling, total | Generous — the whole course, with ads and an energy limit |
| Monthly (iOS) | $29.99 | Super: $9.99 and $12.99 SKUs both live. Max: not published |
| Annual (iOS) | $199.99 (~$17/mo) | Super: $83.99 / $95.99 / $119.99 depending on the offer you land on |
Saygood is better here Duolingo 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.
Duolingo will take an absolute beginner from nothing to a working base of vocabulary and grammar in a way Saygood simply does not attempt. We drop you into a conversation. If you have no words yet, that is a bad first ten minutes. Use Duolingo for a few weeks first — we would rather tell you that than take your money and watch you churn.
You can do the entire Duolingo course without paying, if you can live with ads and the energy limit. Nothing in this comparison changes that.
Saygood is iPhone-only and needs a connection, because a live voice call needs a live connection. If you study on a commute with no signal, that is a hard blocker and we are not going to spin it.
Mock them all you like — the retention data behind that loop is real, and 'the app I actually open' beats 'the better app I stopped using' every time.
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 want a structured course from zero, you want it free, you need Android or offline, or you already know the streak is the only reason you practise at all.
you have already done the course, you can read the language better than you can speak it, and the thing you cannot do is open your mouth in real time without freezing.
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 has Video Call with Lily, an AI character you can speak to. Two limits matter: it is part of the Max subscription rather than the standard Super tier, and it is push-to-talk — you hold a button to speak, release it, and then she answers. That is a useful drill, but it is not the thing that breaks the freeze, because a real conversation has no button and no clean turns.
No. Duolingo Super is cheaper than Saygood at every price point we could verify, and Duolingo's free tier is far more generous than ours. We charge more because live voice costs real money for every minute you talk, in a way that serving lesson screens does not.
That is what we would actually do. Duolingo for vocabulary and grammar on the train, Saygood for a ten-minute call when you want to find out whether any of it comes out of your mouth. They are not really competing for the same half hour.
Because it is not in Apple's published in-app-purchase list for the app, and Duolingo's own annual report declines to state it. We would rather leave a gap than repeat a number we cannot check. Duolingo also runs several concurrent prices for Super — the range in the table is what we could actually see on 30 July 2026.
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