Best App to Learn French: Eight Apps, Public Prices, Real Limits
Duolingo's August shareholder letter counts 140.6 million monthly users, 58.7 million daily ones, and 12.7 million who pay. Anyone hunting the best app to learn French is really asking which one still gets opened in November.
What the best app to learn French has to fix
All three figures sit on one page of one quarterly letter, filed in August for the quarter ending 30 June 2026. Divide the daily number by the monthly one and you get about forty percent. Duolingo publishes the strongest retention in the category, so read that as the ceiling.
Here is the part the category pages leave out. Apps are superb at recognition. You see une ordonnance, you know it means a prescription, and the tick turns green. Recognition is cheap to test and cheap to gamify, and it is not the skill that collapses at the counter. What collapses is production, under a small amount of social pressure, with somebody waiting.
Take the sentence a translation drill hands you, next to the sentence the morning actually needs.
Both are correct French. Only one has ever been said out loud by an adult in France.
The second failure is slower and costs more. An annual plan bought in January is still billed in August whether or not the icon has been tapped since March. So two questions go to every product below. Does it ever make you produce a sentence nobody prompted? And is it still open on a bad Tuesday?
The problem isn't your motivation. It's a fragmented method.
Eight French learning apps, priced from public listings
Every company here runs promotions, regional pricing and paywalled checkout, which is how two review sites print different numbers for the same plan on the same day. So the table uses one source for all eight: the in-app purchase amounts on each app's United States App Store listing, read on 31 August 2026. Scroll to In-App Purchases and check the column yourself.
That source has a side effect worth seeing before the table. Rosetta Stone's listing carries two three-month Latin American Spanish products at once, one at $44.99 and one at $54.99. Busuu's carries a monthly Premium at $23.49 beside older monthly items at $9.99 and $6.99 that long-standing subscribers are presumably still paying. A price column is always a simplification, and this is the simplification.
| App | Price (US App Store listing, 31 Aug 2026) | What it does well | Where it stops | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | Super $12.99/mo · $83.99/yr · family $119.99/yr | Free tier genuinely enough at A1 | You answer, you never start | Getting a daily habit going |
| Babbel | French $17.99/mo · $45.99/3 mo · all languages $107.99/yr | Grammar explained in English | The script breaks when a detail changes | Adults who want the rule, not just the tick |
| Rosetta Stone | French $44.99/3 mo · unlimited languages $109.99/yr | No English anywhere, so you infer | Present tense; no paperwork French | Immersion without booking a tutor |
| Pimsleur | All Access $20.99/mo · $164.99/yr · one language $19.99/mo | Audio only, timed recall, spoken | Traveller register; reading neglected | Commutes, and the weeks before a trip |
| Busuu | Premium $23.49/mo · $138.99/yr · Premium Plus $139.99/yr | Native speakers correct what you write | Corrections arrive late and vary in quality | Written practice, corrected by a human |
| Memrise | $24.99/mo · $61.99/yr · lifetime $329.99 | Clips of real speakers, not studio French | Recognition-heavy; worst monthly value here | Ears, and vocabulary that survives the week |
| italki | Teacher sets the rate, $4 to $60/hr on italki's French page · Plus $5.99/mo, $59.99/yr | A person waits while you finish the sentence | Costs most per hour and needs a diary | Anyone who must speak by a date |
| Lingopie | $13.99/mo · $83.99/yr · $34.99/3 mo | French television with two subtitle tracks | Input only; nothing obliges you to produce | B1 and up who follow some speech |
Two things a table cannot show: that italki has no subscription in the ordinary sense, since Plus buys features while lessons are billed one at a time, and month four, where most of this money is really decided.
The drill apps: Duolingo, Memrise, Babbel
Duolingo
The free tier is the honest answer for a true beginner. The French course is long, the streak works on most people, and the streak is the product. Super removes friction the free version installed on purpose. Where it stops is initiative: every screen hands you a prompt and grades the reply, so four hundred days in you can be fluent at responding and mute at starting. The head to head between Babbel and Duolingo settles that better than a table row.
This page ends where your Thursday begins
Everything above is checkable in ten seconds and settles nothing about the sentence you need at the pharmacy counter on Thursday afternoon. That sentence does not arrive from a subscription. It arrives from having the words written down somewhere you can reach without unlocking anything. Our cheat sheet pack is nine reference sheets, tu versus vous, passé composé versus imparfait, the essential verbs, numbers and dates, pronunciation, false friends and the survival phrases of a first week, and it downloads the moment you enter an email.
Memrise
The clips are the reason to look: short recordings of real people at real speed, a different substance from the studio French most courses record. At $24.99 a month against $61.99 a year, the monthly plan is the weakest value on this page, and $329.99 for lifetime is a bet on a company outliving your interest. Recognising a word on a card and producing it while a pharmacist waits are two different jobs.
The card teaches the first line. The counter asks for the second, and it asks in one go.
Babbel
Babbel explains in English why the thing you just got wrong is wrong, which for an adult is worth real money. The dialogues are clean and sequenced. Real bookings are not clean, and the difference shows the second a detail moves:
Nothing in the first line is wrong. It is the evening in which nothing changed, and evenings change. Adults patch the gap with translation, which is its own trap once you see what machine translation quietly does to a French sentence.
Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Lingopie sell you input
Rosetta Stone
The method is old and it holds up: no English on screen, images and audio only, your brain does the matching, and it builds a real feel for gender and agreement. It also lives in the present tense, in scenes with no counter and no queue. A picture can teach you the sentence on the left. Only a ticket machine will ask you the one on the right.
Three months of French costs $44.99, and the unlimited year at $109.99 is priced to make you buy a language you will not study.
Pimsleur
Thirty minutes, audio, no screen, and the method makes you say the answer before it plays. This is the one that most reliably produces a mouth that has already moved. It trains the traveller's question, right up until the appointment goes wrong:
All Access is $20.99 monthly or $164.99 a year, one language $19.99 monthly, so the annual bundle is the only version that adds up.
Lingopie
French television with two subtitle tracks, clickable words, a review deck built from what you clicked. At $13.99 a month it is the cheapest hour inside real speech. Series French is rich in register and poor in errands, which you feel the first time you have to be dull on the telephone:
The first line makes a French friend laugh. The second gets the boiler fixed.
italki and Busuu put another person in the room
This category answers the production problem directly, and most people skip it because it is uncomfortable. On italki, lessons are billed one at a time and the teacher sets the rate: italki's own French tutor page states four to sixty dollars an hour. Busuu comes from the other side, with written and recorded exercises corrected by native speakers, Premium at $23.49 a month and $138.99 for the year.
If the discomfort is the obstacle rather than the price, that is solvable, and there is a whole method for speaking French when you would rather not. A lesson prompt gives you time to compose. A bad phone line gives you none.
Hour for hour, a tutor is the most expensive line here and the only one that cannot be faked. It is where the habit of running every sentence through English before it leaves your mouth gets broken: the silence while you translate is audible to the person waiting.
Where a news based option sits on the same grid
We run one, so read this row with that in mind. FrenchToEnglish is a website, not an app: nothing to install, no streak, no notification at nine in the evening. The daily feed is free, a French news story rewritten at a level you can hold, vocabulary attached. The paid tier is that feed with audio and level tracking, billed monthly.
The limits are easy to name, because they are the same shape as everyone else's. Nothing here makes you speak. No tutor at the end of it, no pronunciation scoring, no doing it with one thumb at a bus stop. What it gives an adult instead is something worth reading every morning, outside any course: the only mechanism we have found that survives month four. The free version is The French Briefing, and a week of it tells you whether the format suits you.
Choosing the best app to learn French by your deadline
The right answer changes with what is in your calendar. Four cases.
- 1A trip in three weeksPimsleur, single language, one month. You want a mouth that has moved. Cancel when you land.
- 2A move to FranceBabbel or Duolingo for the base, then a tutor at month three. The language requirement does not sit on the visa itself: it arrives with the multi-year card and with naturalisation, which is why what a long-stay visa actually asks for is worth reading first.
- 3A certificate to obtainNo app here prepares an exam format. Which certificate the préfecture accepts is a separate decision, and the choice between the TCF and the DELF changes what you practise this month.
- 4Conversation, no deadlineitalki, one lesson a week, anything free for the other six days. The cheap subscription is the one you drop.
Everyone in case two wants the one thing a store page cannot sell: how long this takes. The arithmetic is public and slightly brutal, and the hours behind each level are worth reading before a twelve-month plan looks cheap. On a tighter deadline, what three months can actually buy you is a smaller and more useful target.
One product note, since the article is about paying for things. If what fails is month four rather than month one, the thing to buy is not another course but a reason to read French on an ordinary morning. That is the job the French Progress Pass does: a daily briefing with audio, and a level that moves. It solves nothing about the pharmacy counter.
Two questions about French learning apps we keep getting
Is the free version of any of these enough?
Duolingo's free tier reaches a shaky A1 and tells you whether you will keep going. Beyond A1 they all fail in the same place: nothing corrects your output.
Is it worth running two apps at once?
Two apps of the same type is money wasted twice. One input source and one production source is a real pairing: Pimsleur or Lingopie on one side, a weekly tutor on the other. If both yours are drill apps, cancel one today.
The words that arrive when the drilling stops
None of these appear early in a course. All appear in a first month in France.
| 🇫🇷 French | 🇺🇸 English | 💡 Context |
|---|---|---|
| une ordonnance | a prescription | The paper the doctor writes; the pharmacy asks for it |
| un justificatif de domicile | proof of address | Requested at almost every counter, often twice |
| Je me suis trompé de guichet. | I queued at the wrong counter. | The most useful admission of month one |
| Vous pouvez répéter, s'il vous plaît ? | Could you say that again, please? | Say it early and the other person slows down |
| Je vous rappelle. | I will call you back. | The exit line when a call is going badly |
| un devis | a quote | Builders, plumbers, garages; nothing starts without it |
| Ça marche. | That works. | Closes a plan without sounding like a textbook |
Duolingo's letter reports one more figure, the one the rest of the industry watches. The share of already-active users who return the following day sits at eighty four percent, counted only on people already active in the previous seven days.
Prefer to keep it free today? Read the French Briefing →
Go further
If you only buy two French books, buy these.
Thirteen years of teaching, hundreds of books tested, ten that made the cut. These two carry most learners further than any app.
#1 pick · Method · A0 → B1
Assimil: New French With Ease
100 short lessons with native audio. The closest thing to a complete French course in book form.
See it on Amazon →
#2 pick · Reader · A1 → B1
Short Stories in French — Olly Richards
Eight stories with real plots, written for learners. The book that gets you unstuck at A2.
See it on Amazon →
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