About Phrasebench
A small test bench for language apps, built on one belief: the app market has plenty of hype and a shortage of dated facts.
What this site is
Phrasebench ranks language learning apps by the job each one actually does — structured courses, audio lessons, speaking feedback, free tiers, rare languages. The centrepiece is the ranked bench of language apps, and around it sit roundups for specific decisions: free versus paid, AI tutors, apps for kids, and per-language picks for Spanish, Korean, Italian, Mandarin and Portuguese. We deliberately publish roundups only — no single-app review pages — because the useful question is almost never "is this app good" but "is this app good for this".
The rules every page follows
- Fragile facts carry dates. A language count, a free-tier limit or a price is only printed if we read it at the vendor's own page, and the read date travels with it.
- What we can't verify, we leave out. Most app vendors don't publish prices to a plain page-load; those pages say "not published" instead of borrowing a number from someone else's review.
- No fluency promises. The only time-to-learn figures on this site are the US Foreign Service Institute's classroom estimates, quoted as theirs.
- The free option gets named. Where free is honestly the right start, we say so — including for apps that pay us nothing because they run no partner program at all.
Where the money comes from
Some apps we cover run partner programs; when you subscribe through one of our marked links, that app pays us a commission. It changes what we earn, never what we rank — and the proof is on the pages: Duolingo and Speak hold recommended positions while paying us nothing. The full arrangement, including the programs we refuse, is in the affiliate disclosure.
What we are not
We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or employed by any app maker named on this site; brand names appear because you can't compare products without naming them. We are not linguists selling a method, and we are not a coupon site. If a fact on any page has gone stale — vendors change catalogues and prices without telling reviewers — tell us and we'll re-check it at the source.