Duolingo wants a monogamous relationship with one language. Mondly does not care if you are two-timing it with Italian, Spanish, and a Japanese app you downloaded on a whim and never opened again. That is the whole pitch for anyone stuck being a beginner polyglot instead of a tidy one-language learner, and it is the reason a stack of half-finished language apps is still sitting on my phone instead of getting deleted.
Quick disclosure before the questions start: some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. I have paid for every app named in this review out of my own invoicing account — usually while parked at a corner table at Cargo Coffee on Atwood Avenue, ignoring actual client work. If you already know you want Mondly, here is where you can look at its current plans. Otherwise, here is what people actually ask me about it.
Mondly vs. Duolingo: Two Different Bets on How You Learn
The short answer: Mondly is built for someone rotating between languages, and Duolingo is built for someone committing to one path at a time. Whichever describes you is what actually determines which app is useful, before you get anywhere near a conversation about screen design or app store ratings. Mondly by Pearson covers 41 languages, which means hopping between Italian one day and Spanish the next counts as normal use rather than a discipline problem. The Daily Lesson sits at the center of it, tied to a streak counter that hooks into whatever part of my brain used to care about video game achievements.
Most of my actual app comparisons happen at my desk, where a second monitor exists mostly so I can run two apps side by side instead of trusting memory. Behind it hangs a wall calendar someone gave me as a joke gift years ago, color-coded for tracking daily habits, with enough blank weeks on it this year that it has stopped being funny. That is roughly where the beginner-polyglot problem shows up in physical form: not a grand theory of language acquisition, just a calendar with gaps, two monitors comparing apps that all promise the same streak, and a notification bell I mute within the first week of installing anything new.
Where the Grammar Drills Start to Feel Like Eating Vegetables
They are fine. That is the honest answer to whether Mondly's grammar exercises hold up: functional, not exciting, closer to phrase-building than to actual structural teaching (I still cannot keep siamo and stiamo straight, and Mondly has yet to fix that for me). Skipping the drills shows up later as confusion no vocabulary flashcard can undo, the same reason I eat my vegetables before the things I actually want to eat. If you want something closer to a classroom, EF English Live goes considerably deeper, mapping its curriculum to CEFR across sixteen levels instead of the six most apps aim for. It only teaches English, though, so it solves a different problem than juggling three languages does. And finishing a grammar unit is not the same as being ready to survive an actual conversation, which is a question worth answering on its own rather than folding it into a review of exercises.
Rocket Languages or Mondly: Which One Actually Earns the Subscription?
If you want a habit-building app you open for five minutes with coffee, keep Mondly. If you want a course library deep enough to disappear into for an afternoon, and you would rather pay once than watch a subscription auto-renew, Rocket Languages is the better fit, even though its interface looks like it stalled somewhere around 2018. I have both installed, and I still remember answering a Rocket Languages audio drill mid-sentence while I was supposed to be finishing a client invoice, repeating a phrase back at my laptop between line items instead of proofreading. That is not focused studying, but it is the kind of studying that actually happens during a deadline week. A longer side-by-side for anyone working from home lives in this Mondly vs Rocket Languages for Remote Workers breakdown.
Rocket's lessons are built audio-first, which suits people who learn by ear rather than by staring at a screen. That same format happens to work well for heritage learners reconnecting with a language they grew up hearing at home, which is a separate question from the one this piece is answering, but worth knowing if it applies to you. Whether an app subscription is worth keeping at all, versus paying once, usually comes down to whether you actually open it. I know this because I paid for Babbel for six months and stopped opening it after week three, which is a more embarrassing admission than it should be for someone who writes about this for a living. My friend Yara, who I still trade language-app opinions with over Slack, likes to point out that one freelancer's daily-streak habit is not exactly a sample size, and she is right, though it has never once stopped me from writing another review based on exactly that.
Does the AR Mode Help, or Is It a Gimmick?
A reader named Fiona Ramirez emailed a version of this question after an earlier Mondly piece went up, short and direct the way her follow-ups usually are: does the AR cat trick actually teach you anything, or is it just a screenshot for the app store listing? My answer is that it works, more than I expected it to. Mondly's AR mode projects a small virtual object onto whatever surface your phone is pointed at while it teaches you the word for it, and something about seeing the word attached to a shape sitting on my own coffee table made it stick harder than a flashcard ever has. It is one of the reasons I keep pointing beginners toward Mondly's Japanese track specifically, since a language with an unfamiliar writing system benefits more than most from a visual anchor that is not just another line of text.
The Voice Recognition Problem Nobody Talks About
Mondly's voice recognition will occasionally reject a word you are pronouncing correctly, over and over, for reasons that have nothing to do with your Italian. I have said "uovo" the way my grandmother did and watched the app flag it wrong three times running, which produces a very specific kind of low-grade irritation that no streak counter fixes. Part of the issue is structural: underneath, it is a spaced repetition system, and those are excellent at scheduling what you review but not always great at judging whether what came out of your mouth was close enough. The app that handles this best in my rotation is not Mondly at all. It is Pimsleur, whose narrator has this habit of going quiet for just a beat before expecting an answer back, long enough that I have caught myself blurting the word out before I consciously found it. Mondly has nothing that patient built in. Exactly how vocabulary review and spaced repetition decide what to resurface and when is a deeper question than this review has room for. When the voice-recognition grading gets to me, a live-class alternative starts looking appealing precisely because a human teacher does not need three identical attempts to understand what you meant.
Deciding Whether Mondly Still Deserves a Spot in Your Language-Habit Rotation
Here is the actual decision, stripped of app-store language: keep Mondly if you are rotating between two or three languages and mostly need a daily nudge plus enough vocabulary to survive outside your own country. Drop it if you only care about one language deeply, in which case EF English Live's structured levels or Rocket Languages' course depth will serve you better than another streak counter. A streak itself is not the goal; it is just one way to enforce a habit, and plenty of people keep the habit going long after they have stopped caring about the number, which is a distinction worth more attention than most reviews give it. I am not chasing any streak record at this point. I just want to order dinner in more than one country without panicking, and for that specific, unglamorous goal, Mondly earns its spot on my phone more often than it gets deleted. If that sounds like your situation too, Mondly's current plans are here, and if it does not, at least you now know which of the other two to check out instead.