We make one of the apps on this list, so read it accordingly. What follows tries to be useful anyway, on the theory that a roundup which sends you elsewhere when elsewhere is right is worth more than one that does not.

Before the list, the question that decides it.

Work out which problem you have

People leave Duolingo for four fairly distinct reasons, and the right replacement is different for each.

You are bored, but the format is fine. You want the same kind of study, better taught. Your problem is content quality.
You do not understand the grammar. You can produce sentences you have seen and nothing else, because nothing ever explained the system underneath.
You cannot understand people at natural speed. Reading is fine; listening falls apart.
You cannot speak. You understand plenty, and you freeze the moment somebody expects you to say something back.

Most roundups treat these as one problem called “learning a language”. They are not, and the fourth is the one Duolingo is structurally worst at, because choosing a word from four options is recognition and speaking is production.

If your problem is content quality

Babbel. Lessons written by actual curriculum people, in reasonable dialogue, with grammar explained as you go. Cheaper than the AI tools, around ten to fifteen dollars a month on an annual plan. If you liked Duolingo’s format and just want it done properly for a language you are serious about, this is the straightforward answer.

Busuu. Similar territory, with a corrections feature where native speakers mark your written work. The community element is genuinely useful and it is free to reciprocate.

If your problem is grammar

Babbel again, honestly, or a textbook. This is the one case where an app is often not the answer: a good grammar for your language, worked through slowly, is cheaper and better than anything on this list. Assimil and the Teach Yourself series are still excellent.

If your problem is listening

Pimsleur. Audio-first, drilled, and old-fashioned in a way that still works. Thirty-minute audio lessons that force recall out loud with no screen. Expensive for what it is, and the vocabulary is dated, but nothing else builds listening comprehension and automatic recall as reliably.

Also, and this is free: watch things. Subtitled, in the target language, for hours. There is no app that substitutes for volume of input.

If your problem is speaking

This is the crowded category now, and the one worth spending words on.

italki. Book a real human, from around ten to thirty dollars an hour depending on language and whether you want a qualified teacher or a conversation partner. This is the actual answer to the actual problem, and no AI product on this list is better than a good human tutor. The reasons people do not do it are scheduling, cost, and being too embarrassed to be bad in front of a person. Those are real reasons, but be honest with yourself about which one is operating.

Talkpal. The cheapest way into AI conversation, with a free tier and dozens of languages. Good for finding out whether talking to an AI suits you at all before spending anything. Thin behind the conversation: no real curriculum, and the language list is broad rather than deep.

Langua. About twenty dollars a month, on web, iOS and Android, with a big library of conversation topics and a spaced-repetition flashcard deck built from words you save. It is also attached to LanguaTalk, so you can book a human tutor through the same account. Probably the best general-purpose value in this group.

Speak. Around twenty dollars a month, nine languages, structured as a course rather than as open conversation. Drills you on set phrases until they come out without thinking. Genuinely good at that, and the right choice if you are a beginner who finds open conversation paralysing because you do not yet have anything to say.

Well Versed. Ours, so here is the specific case rather than a pitch. It is US$39.99 a month across seventeen languages. It sends your audio to the model directly rather than transcribing it first, so the tutor responds to how you sound rather than to a text version of it, which matters for things a transcript quietly fixes: a Japanese vowel held too short, a missing aspiration in Hindi, the hesitation before the verb. Each language has an authored CEFR syllabus behind it and five tutors with real regional accents. And it has a Travel Mode, which is the case it was built for: rehearsal before a trip, one real-world mission a day while you are there set in the city you are in, and a debrief with your tutor afterwards about how it actually went with a real person.

It is the most expensive thing on this list by some distance. If cost is a constraint, one of the others above is a better answer, and if you will actually book a human, do that instead.

What we would tell a friend

If you have been on Duolingo for a year and cannot speak, the problem is almost never that you need a better Duolingo. It is that you have done a great deal of recognition and almost no production, and the fix is to talk to somebody, badly, repeatedly, until it stops being frightening.

Book an italki lesson if you can face it. If you cannot, use an AI product to get to the point where you can. That is a reasonable use of one, and probably the most honest thing anybody selling one can tell you.