7 Best Duolingo Alternatives for Speaking (2026)

Duolingo is the best habit builder language learning has ever produced, and that is exactly why the gap catches people out.

You keep a streak for two years, then someone asks you a question in the language you have been studying and nothing comes out. The app was never training that. On the free and Super tiers, every speaking exercise is scripted, and nothing you say changes what happens next.

If you want unscripted conversation starting today, SpeakShark is free with three AI conversation sessions a day and no card. Our own free ceiling is five minutes and four turns per session, so about fifteen minutes of talking a day, and we say so up front because this guide holds other products to the same disclosure.

In this guide: the speaking gap · what Duolingo does well · the pricing problem · how we compared · the comparison table · 1. SpeakShark · 2. Busuu · 3. italki · 4. Cambly · 5. Preply · 6. ELSA and BoldVoice · 7. Speak and TalkPal · when to stay · how we researched this guide · FAQ

Key takeaways

• On Duolingo's free and Super tiers there is no unscripted conversation at all. Speaking means repeating, reading aloud and picking from options, graded by speech recognition.
• Real conversation, meaning Video Call and Roleplay, is exclusive to the top Max tier.
• Duolingo publishes no prices on its own website. duolingo.com/pricing returns a 404 and the Super plan table lists features with no numbers. Prices do exist on Duolingo's US App Store listing, at 9.99, 12.99, 83.99, 95.99 and 119.99 dollars with no billing period stated, and Max is absent from that list.
• Video Call conversations run about one minute early in a course and up to three minutes for advanced learners.
• Video Call covers a handful of languages, not the 280 plus courses Duolingo advertises.
• Our own free tier is capped too: three sessions a day, each ending at five minutes and four turns, so at most about fifteen minutes of speaking a day. Paid sessions are unlimited in number and run ten minutes each.

The gap between streaks and speaking

Duolingo describes its own speaking exercises clearly enough if you go looking: repeating words, translating sentences out loud, short dialogues where you choose a response from a list, and flashcard style pronunciation drills, all scored by speech recognition.

Every one of those is production. You make a sound, software checks it against an expected answer. What none of them is, is conversation, where your answer determines the next question and you have to handle something you did not prepare for.

That distinction is not pedantic. It is the difference between knowing vocabulary and being able to use it when a colleague asks you something unexpected in a meeting. We wrote about why this matters in why scripted dialogues do not make you fluent and why you can read English but cannot speak it.

Duolingo does solve this, but only on Max. Video Call and Roleplay are Max exclusive per Duolingo's own announcement, so the more than 130 million monthly active learners Duolingo reports, of whom about 12.5 million pay for any subscription at all, are largely practising a different skill from the one they think they are practising.

What Duolingo genuinely does better than us

A comparison post that only lists a competitor's flaws is an advert. Here is where Duolingo wins, honestly.

The free tier is enormous. Over 280 courses across more than forty languages, plus Maths, Music and Chess, at no cost. That is far broader than anything we offer and broader than everything else in this comparison.

Video Call is genuinely good. Duolingo describes it as spontaneous free flowing conversation, says it adapts to your level, deliberately does not correct grammar mid conversation so the flow survives, and remembers what you discussed on the previous call. Cross session memory is a feature we value in our own product and we are not going to pretend it is uniquely ours.

Call volume on Max is generous. Duolingo says you can call as many times as you want, which is more permissive per day than our own free tier, where you get three sessions and each one stops at five minutes and four turns.

Two conversation modes. A guided beginner mode and an unguided one for confident learners is a thoughtful answer to the problem of freezing on your first call.

Habit formation is untouchable. Streaks, XP and reminders drive retention that we, and everyone else here, cannot match.

If daily consistency is your actual problem, Duolingo may be the right tool and you should keep it.

Duolingo publishes no prices on its own website

This surprised us enough to check three times.

duolingo.com/pricing returns a 404. The plan comparison on the Super page lists Free, Super and Super Family with feature rows and no numbers. The official Duolingo Max announcement post carries no price. And Max does not appear in the in-app purchase list on Duolingo's own US App Store page.

So the gap is the website, not the whole company, and it is worth being precise about that.

The figures that do exist on a Duolingo controlled surface are App Store in-app purchases for Super Duolingo at 9.99, 12.99, 83.99, 95.99 and 119.99 dollars, with no billing period stated next to any of them. We cannot tell you which is monthly and which is annual, so we are not going to guess.

You will find confident annual prices for Super and Max on review sites. We could not trace any of them to a page Duolingo controls, so they do not appear here.

There is a second inconsistency worth knowing. Duolingo's web page advertises a one week free trial while its App Store description says fourteen days, and the same feature is called Unlimited Hearts on one page and Unlimited Energy on another. Read whichever surface you are actually buying through.

For contrast, our own price is on the pricing page: ten dollars a month or sixty nine a year, and the same page carries the limits, including the five minute cap on free sessions and the ten minute length of paid ones. We think being able to see the price and the ceiling before you sign up is the bar, not a feature.

How we compared these alternatives

We read each product's own pricing, product and help pages on 1 August 2026 and recorded only what those pages say. Where a company publishes no price on a surface we wrote that down rather than borrowing a number from a review site, which is why the Duolingo section above reports a 404 and an App Store listing instead of the annual figures you will find elsewhere.

We ranked on one axis: how much unscripted speaking you get, at what cost, with how much friction. A tool with a brilliant curriculum you never speak into loses to a plainer one that gets you talking daily.

We make one of these products. SpeakShark is our Editor's Pick, and the section above on what Duolingo does better is there because we would rather be trusted than flattering.

The seven alternatives compared

1. SpeakShark: Editor's Pick

SpeakShark is our pick for the exact gap Duolingo leaves, which is talking without a script.

Every session is a conversation. You speak, an AI teacher responds to what you actually said, and you get feedback on pronunciation, grammar and fluency while it is still running. The teacher remembers you between sessions, so recurring mistakes and your level carry forward.

Two structural differences from Duolingo. Unscripted conversation is not a premium tier here, it is the entire product, and it is in the free plan. And the price is published: ten dollars a month for unlimited sessions of up to ten minutes each, with unlimited turns.

Our free tier has a ceiling and you should know it before you sign up. Free gives you three sessions a day with no card, but each session ends at five minutes or four turns, whichever comes first. That is at most about fifteen minutes of speaking a day, or roughly 105 minutes a week. It is enough to build a daily habit and to hear whether the feedback is any good, and it is not enough to be your only practice if you are preparing for something in a fortnight. We list a competitor's cap in almost every section below, so we are not going to hide our own.

Where Duolingo beats us, honestly: breadth and habit. More than forty languages against our focus on English, a mature curriculum with real progression, and gamification that keeps people coming back for years. If your problem is showing up rather than speaking, Duolingo is the better tool and we will not pretend otherwise.

Start free, see the limits on the pricing page, or read how it works. Wider comparisons are in the best English speaking apps of 2026, the best free apps for speaking practice and the best apps for learning English in 2026.

2. Busuu: closest course replacement

If what you like about Duolingo is the structured path, Busuu is the nearest swap with better speaking built in.

It is CEFR aligned, so you always know what level you are working at, and it does offer genuinely improvised AI conversation. Busuu's own page says the AI partner starts an improvised conversation and that, because it is not following a script, you get to think on your feet.

Two caveats. That feature is in the top Premium Plus tier, and the AI analyses your responses after the conversation ends rather than during it, so correction is retrospective. Busuu also discloses that your voice is recorded and saved to help train its model, and its English FAQ states it does not offer one to one sessions with English teachers on the app.

Good for: learners who want a syllabus and a level. Bad for: live correction mid sentence.

3. italki: best for a real human

If the Duolingo problem is that software cannot hear nuance, the answer is a person. italki is a marketplace of independent teachers who set their own rates, with over four thousand English teachers listed.

Costs are real though. There is no free speaking tier, only three discounted trial lessons that must be with three different teachers. Credits are prepaid and, per italki's own policy, authorised payments are final with no cash refunds. Credits expire after twelve months of inactivity, and payment settles in US dollars with a third party processing fee on top. On italki's own English teacher listing on 1 August 2026 the cheapest hourly rate we could reproduce was USD 9.00, and trial lessons ran from USD 6.00 up to USD 32.89. Even at that floor, an hour of practice every day works out around 270 dollars a month, and most teachers charge more. italki's own blog puts typical lessons at four to twenty five dollars a session, which is its figure rather than ours.

Good for: nuance, accountability and exam specific help. Bad for: daily volume on a budget. Full detail in italki alternatives.

4. Cambly: best for instant human access

Cambly puts you on video with a native speaker within minutes, with no booking negotiation.

Its constraints are structural. There is no free tier, and Cambly publishes a help article titled "Why isn't Cambly free?" explaining why. Minutes refresh every Monday at 3:00 AM local time and unused minutes expire. There is a hard cap of sixty weekly minutes in a single day. The cheapest tier is a small group, which Cambly describes as a tutor with one to two students in total, so at most one other learner alongside you. Recordings, transcripts and automated feedback start at the Private+ tier rather than the entry plan. Since we are listing Cambly's ceiling, here is ours again: free sessions stop at five minutes and four turns, three a day.

Good for: talking to a human today. Bad for: an unpredictable schedule. See Cambly alternatives.

5. Preply: best for one committed tutor

Preply's real strength is continuity. You keep one tutor who learns your weak spots instead of restarting with a stranger every week, and the structured plan means someone is expecting you, which is the single thing most self study routines lack. Nothing in this guide, ours included, matches a human who remembers last week's conversation and picks it back up.

That comes wrapped in a twenty eight day subscription tied to that specific tutor, with a minimum of four lessons per cycle. Preply's own example is that a tutor charging ten euros a lesson makes the minimum plan forty euros a cycle.

Its help centre states plainly that trial lessons are paid lessons, and that lessons not scheduled before the renewal date expire while booked ones are fully protected. Preply does not publish an expiry rule for top up balances, so treat that as unknown rather than safe.

Good for: a teacher who gets to know you. Bad for: flexibility. See Preply alternatives.

6. ELSA and BoldVoice: best for pronunciation

If your Duolingo speaking scores are fine but people still ask you to repeat yourself, the problem is pronunciation rather than conversation, and a drill app is the sharper tool.

ELSA does the sound level work better than we do. Its phoneme scoring is the most granular in the category, it colours the exact sounds you missed inside a very large targeted exercise library, and if one stubborn consonant is what stands between you and being understood, nothing here fixes it faster. ELSA also publishes an AI Role-play mode for real world scenarios and a bilingual AI tutor, so conversation practice does exist on the product.

BoldVoice is the best coach led accent product we have used. Its lessons are filmed with professional dialect coaches rather than generated, its accent assessment is unusually specific about what marks your speech, and that human craft is something an AI first product like ours cannot fake. BoldVoice also lists conversation practice and AI role play alongside the drills.

So the fair framing is not that these two cannot hold a conversation. It is that both are drill first products whose strongest work happens at the level of individual sounds, and both have since added role play on top. If open ended talking is the main job, a conversation first app goes deeper. If a specific sound is the main job, they beat us at it.

Good for: specific sounds and accent work. Bad for: open ended fluency as the primary goal. See ELSA Speak alternatives, BoldVoice alternatives and six pronunciation fixes in fourteen days.

7. Speak and TalkPal: other AI conversation apps

If you want AI conversation but not ours, these are the two worth knowing. Speak leans on a structured curriculum wrapped around spoken practice. TalkPal covers many languages with a chat first interface.

Good for: comparing AI approaches. Bad for: nothing in particular, they are reasonable products. See Speak app alternatives, TalkPal alternatives and our Speak versus Duolingo comparison.

When Duolingo is still the right choice

You are a genuine beginner. Duolingo's early curriculum is excellent and conversation practice is frustrating before you have any vocabulary to converse with. Build the base first.

You want more than one language. Nothing here matches over 280 courses across more than forty languages, plus Maths, Music and Chess, at no cost.

Consistency is your real problem. If you have quit three apps in a year, the tool that actually gets you to open it daily beats the theoretically better one you abandon. Streaks work.

You are on Max and it suits you. Video Call is a real conversation product. If you are already paying for it and getting daily calls, you have solved the speaking gap.

Not sure where you stand? Test your English speaking level free, then read why your English speaking is not improving. If the blocker is nerves, start with overcoming the fear of speaking English and building confidence in English. For days you practise alone, see practising English speaking alone and free methods to raise fluency.

How we researched this guide

Everything about Duolingo above came from Duolingo controlled pages on 1 August 2026: the Super plan page, the gift page, the homepage, the official blog posts announcing Max, Video Call, the AI behind Video Call, the beginner Video Call and its approach to speaking skills, plus the 2025 Language Report, the investor filings carrying the user numbers, and its own US App Store listing. We also confirmed that duolingo.com/pricing returns a 404.

The italki hourly floor and trial range are observed listings we could reproduce on italki's English teacher page on that date, not italki marketing copy. The four to twenty five dollars a session range is italki's own blog figure and is labelled as such. Our own numbers, including the five minute free session cap, the four turn limit and the ten minute paid session length, come from the plan configuration the app actually enforces.

We have deliberately not printed the annual prices for Super, Super Family or Max that circulate widely on review sites, because none of them appear on a page Duolingo controls. We have also not assigned billing periods to the App Store figures, because Apple lists them without periods and guessing would be inventing a fact. Any App Store number is the US storefront only; regional pricing is not something Duolingo publishes.

Competitor facts come from each company's own pricing and help pages. SpeakShark's prices come from our pricing configuration rather than marketing copy.

Practise speaking, from SpeakShark

SpeakShark is an AI English speaking practice app, and it is our pick for anyone whose streak has stopped turning into speech. Every session is an unscripted conversation rather than a drill: you talk, the AI answers what you actually said, and you get feedback on pronunciation, grammar and fluency while the conversation is still going. Your teacher remembers you between sessions, so progress carries forward.

Start free with three sessions a day and no card. Free sessions stop at five minutes and four turns, so plan on about fifteen minutes of speaking a day until you upgrade, and paid sessions run ten minutes with unlimited turns. The full limits are on the pricing page, and how it works walks through a full session.

We are a speaking improvement tool and we are not affiliated with Duolingo, Busuu, italki, Cambly, Preply or any other product named here. Prices and features change often, so check the current figures on their own sites before you buy.

• Site: speakshark.com
• Support: speaksharksupport@gmail.com
• Free tier: 3 AI conversation sessions per day, 5 minutes and 4 turns each, no card
• Premium: $10 a month or $69 a year, unlimited sessions of 10 minutes with unlimited turns

Sources

• Duolingo Super plan page: the Free, Super and Super Family feature table, with no prices
• Duolingo Max announcement: Video Call and Roleplay as Max exclusive features
• Duolingo Video Call: spontaneous conversation, level adaptation, call length
• The AI behind Video Call: how Lily is given a list of facts from your previous calls
• Duolingo on speaking skills: the scripted speaking exercise types
• Duolingo 2025 Language Report: over 280 courses teaching 40 plus languages, maths, music and chess, all free
• Duolingo investor relations: the monthly active user and paid subscriber figures quoted above
• Duolingo on the US App Store: the only Duolingo controlled surface showing any prices
• Busuu: AI Conversations in Premium Plus, no one to one English teachers on the app
• italki teachers, English: observed hourly rates from USD 9.00 and trial prices from USD 6.00 to USD 32.89 on 1 August 2026
• italki: italki Plus pricing and the marketplace model
• ELSA Speak: AI Role-play for real world language practice and the bilingual AI tutor
• BoldVoice: conversation practice and AI role play alongside coach led accent lessons
• SpeakShark pricing: free sessions capped at 5 minutes and 4 turns, paid sessions 10 minutes with unlimited turns

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