Prices checked July 2026.
Start here: Readlang is good, and cheap
Most "alternatives" articles open by explaining why the thing you're using is bad. Readlang isn't bad. At $6/month it's the cheapest competent tool in this category, the free tier gives you unlimited single-word translations, and the browser extension does something no book app can: it makes the entire foreign-language web tappable.
If that's what you need, you're already using the right tool and you can stop reading.
People generally leave for one of two reasons, and they point at completely different replacements:
- "I want my vocabulary properly tracked." Readlang's word system is deliberately simple. If you want a machine that models what you know, you want LingQ or Anki.
- "I want to read a book, not a web page." This is the more common one, and it's a category problem, not a feature gap. Readlang is a layer over the web. A novel is not a web page.
The options
| App | Price (July 2026) | Best at | Import your own books? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Readlang (what you have) | $6/mo, $48/yr | Any web page, cheaply | Web pages + uploads |
| LingQ | $14.99/mo, $119.99/yr | Rigorous vocabulary tracking | Yes |
| Simply Fluent | Free; €7.99/mo, €59.99/yr | Reading books without stopping every line | Yes, plus its own graded stories (A1-C2) and modernized classics |
| Anki | Free (paid iOS app) | Review only, not reading | n/a |
| Kindle | No subscription | You may already own one | Yes |
| Beelinguapp | $7.99/mo, $49.90/yr (App Store) | Parallel text for beginners | No |
If you want a real vocabulary system
LingQ
The maximal version of the thing Readlang does lightly. Every word you meet holds a state, new, learning, known, and that state follows you across everything you ever read in the app. It drives statistics and a review queue.
This is genuinely better than Readlang at vocabulary, and better than us too. If the tracking is the point, LingQ is the most complete tool in this category and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
The catch is price. At $14.99/month it's about two and a half times Readlang, and the free tier is tight (20 saved words, 5 imports). Those are the US figures we saw in July 2026; LingQ varies by region.
Anki, free
Worth saying plainly: if what you want is the review half, you don't need to replace Readlang at all. Add Anki.
Anki is the spaced-repetition engine most serious learners end up on. It has no reader, you bring your own words. Keep Readlang at $6 for the reading, add Anki for free, and you've assembled most of what LingQ sells for $15 a month.
It's unapologetically utilitarian, and the iOS app costs money. But it's free on everything else and it's better at review than anything bundled into a reading app.
If you want to read books
This is the real reason most people look for a Readlang alternative, and it's worth naming clearly: Readlang is a layer over the web. That is its strength and its boundary. A 300-page novel is not a web page, and reading one inside a browser extension is not what the tool is for.
Simply Fluent, free, or €7.99/month
Ours, so weigh it accordingly.
The premise is the inverse of Readlang's. Readlang is a layer you put over text. Simply Fluent is built around the reading itself, for sitting with a book for an hour rather than annotating a page for five minutes.
Tap a word and you get the meaning that fits that sentence, not the dictionary's first entry, and it catches expressions and idioms rather than going word by word.
The mechanic that matters over three hundred pages: save a translation once and it appears above that word from then on, on every page, in every book. You never look it up twice. When you know a word, mark it memorized and the translation stops showing. The highlight stays, so you can reveal it again whenever you need to, and the page gets cleaner at the pace you genuinely learn. Saved words also become flashcards from your own books, weighted toward the ones you keep meeting.
Free to start with no card. €7.99/month or €59.99/year, which is about half of LingQ. Thirty-seven languages fully supported, ninety-odd more with translation tools.
Where we're worse than Readlang: we don't touch the open web. If you want to tap words in a news article you just opened, we're useless and Readlang is exactly right. We're also more expensive than $6.
Kindle, no subscription
Check whether you already own the answer.
Kindle's Vocabulary Builder keeps one word list across your entire library, so a word saved in one book is there in the next. Some comparison articles claim otherwise. They're wrong, and it's a convenient error we're not going to repeat.
For a lot of people, a Kindle plus a free foreign-language dictionary is enough.
The catches, as of July 2026: Word Wise is monolingual, showing simple English definitions of hard English words, so it does nothing for a Spanish or French learner; Vocabulary Builder only exists on the e-reader hardware, not the phone app; and Amazon removed the Flashcards feature in late 2024. We went through this properly in our Kindle piece.
If Readlang is too hard, not too limited
One more case, worth separating out.
If the problem isn't Readlang's features but the fact that everything you try to read is exhausting, no app fixes that. The material is too hard. That's a book-choice problem, not a software problem, and the fix is to read something easier.
Beelinguapp puts the two languages physically side by side with professionally recorded, sentence-synced audio, which at A1 and A2 is a gentler format than any tap-to-translate tool, including ours. That's a format difference rather than a content one: we write our own graded short stories at A1 and A2 too, so the choice is how the translation reaches you, not whether there's anything you can read. It's a closed library, so you can't bring your own book. It publishes no pricing on its own site; the App Store listing shows $7.99/month and $49.90/year as of July 2026.
The short answer
- Web pages, cheap: stay on Readlang. It's the right tool.
- Want the tracking: LingQ, or just bolt free Anki onto the Readlang you already have.
- Want to read novels: a book-first app. Simply Fluent, or Kindle if you own one.
- Everything feels too hard: read something easier. That's not a software problem.
