Praktika is the one with animated 3D avatar tutors, and the messiest pricing in the set.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Praktika | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live conversation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Real-time speech-to-speech | ✓ | ✗transcribe, then reply |
| Interrupt mid-sentence | ✓ | ✗ |
| Slang dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Speaking-speed dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Patience dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Corrections dial | ✓ | ✓three levels |
| Immersion dial | ✓five steps | ✗tutor uses your language |
| Change the dials mid-call | ✓ | ✗outside the session |
| Partners you invent | ✓ | ✗preset tutors |
| Scenarios you write | ✓ | ~free conversation |
| Level from a spoken call | ✓from a 5-minute call | ✗ |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓in session |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓adaptive study plan |
| Languages | 20+ | Fewer · English-first |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $9.99/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Praktika does 4, 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.
Praktika is a third of our price and puts a face on screen. Saygood is a conversation rather than a guided session — someone you invented, who stays in the language, tuned while you are talking to them.
A face on screen makes the whole thing click for some people, and at $9.99 against our $29.99 the gap is serious enough to weigh first. Its strictness setting is one of the few places a competitor matches a Saygood dial.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It has a real user base and years of reviews behind it, where we launched in 2026 with neither.
you want a visible tutor, the cheapest monthly here, or a guided session rather than a conversation.
you want a conversation, with someone specific, who does not switch back to English.
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.
That is a fair question and there is no single answer. Apple's in-app-purchase list for the iOS app showed $9.99 monthly and three different annual prices live at the same time: $49.99, $119.99 and $139.99. Which one you see appears to depend on the offer you land on. Read the price on your own screen before confirming — including on our app.
The most common recurring theme in its lower-rated App Store reviews is billing: unexpected charges, difficulty getting refunds, and confusion about what was actually purchased. We are flagging it because it is a visible pattern in public reviews, not because we have any inside knowledge — read them yourself and judge.
Your partners have a face and a personality in the app, but a Saygood call is a call — you are not watching an animated tutor while you speak. That is deliberate: on a real phone call there is nothing to look at either, and we would rather spend the compute on the voice.
Ours, and this is the one place we will be unequivocal. A guided session with a tutor avatar who switches into your language to help you is a lesson. Talking at full speed to someone who stays in the language, with no visual scaffolding and no objective to complete, is a different skill — and it is the one that fails you in the real world.
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.