LingQ vs Readlang: Which One Should You Use? (2026)

Prices checked July 2026.

The one question that decides it

Strip away the feature lists and these two apps are built on opposite bets about what you're going to read.

LingQ bets you want a system. It tracks every word you've ever seen, forever, across everything you read in it, and feeds that into statistics and a review queue.

Readlang bets you want a layer. It sits on top of whatever you were already reading on the web and makes it tappable.

So: is your reading mostly on web pages, or mostly in long texts you'll import?

If it's the web, Readlang wins, it's cheaper, and you can stop reading here. If you want the vocabulary system, LingQ wins and the price is the cost of admission. Everything below is detail.

Side by side

Note on LingQ's prices: those are the US figures we were shown in July 2026. LingQ prices vary by region, so check what it quotes you rather than trusting our number.

What LingQ is really doing

LingQ's real product isn't the reader. It's the model of your vocabulary.

Every word in every text is in a state: new, learning, known, ignored. That state persists across everything, so a word you met in an article three months ago is still marked when it shows up in a podcast transcript today. The app counts your known words, tracks the curve, and turns the unknown ones into review.

For some people this is genuinely motivating. Watching the known-word count climb is a real feedback loop, and it's the closest thing in this category to a system that tells you whether you're improving.

The costs are equally real. It's the most expensive option here at $14.99/month, roughly two and a half times Readlang. The free tier is very tight: 20 saved words is enough to evaluate the app and not much else. And there's a lot of interface between you and the text, which is a fair trade if you want the system and an irritation if you don't.

What Readlang is really doing

Readlang's insight is that you already read things.

It's primarily a browser extension. Install it and the foreign-language web becomes tappable: news sites, blogs, Wikipedia, fan wikis, whatever you open. Click a word, get a translation, save it. It also takes uploaded text.

That's a broader input surface than any book app, and it's the whole argument for it. You aren't finding material, you're annotating what you'd have read anyway.

At $6/month it's the cheapest paid tool in this category by a distance. The free tier is unusually generous, with unlimited single-word translations, and only caps phrase translations at 10 a day.

Where it's weaker: the vocabulary system is simpler. There's no equivalent of LingQ's known/unknown state machine across your entire history, and no comparable statistics. If tracking is the thing you want, Readlang is a lighter tool and you'll notice.

The money

Over a year, at the July 2026 prices:

• Readlang: $48/year
• LingQ: $119.99/year

That's a real gap, and it should be the deciding factor if the features are close for you. LingQ costs meaningfully more, and it's worth being honest that this only makes sense if you're using the vocabulary system. If you're paying $120 a year to tap words and read, you're paying for machinery you aren't running.

So which one?

Choose Readlang if:

• Most of what you read is on the web
• You want the cheapest competent option
• You want a light tool, not a system
• The free tier's unlimited single-word lookups already cover you

Choose LingQ if:

• You want every word tracked with real rigour
• The statistics motivate you
• You'll use the review queue rather than just intending to
• Its library is where you'll get your material

When neither is right

Here's the honest gap both of them share, and it's the reason we built something else.

Both are excellent at fragments. Articles, lessons, clips, imports. Neither is really built around the experience of sitting down with a novel and reading it for an hour, the way you'd read a book in your own language.

If what you want is to sit down with an actual novel and read it, you want a tool built around the reading rather than a system or a layer.

That's the bet we made with Simply Fluent: translation that reads the sentence rather than listing definitions, and, the part that matters over a long book, a word you save once is shown above that word from then on, on every page, in every book. You never look it up twice. There's a personal dictionary and flashcards built from the words you saved, but the point is that you don't have to go and use them for the reading to get easier: the help is right there in the text. When you know a word, you mark it memorized and it stops showing, though the highlight stays so you can reveal it again whenever it slips.

A Kindle with a foreign dictionary does a simpler version of this, and it's worth knowing exactly what it does and doesn't do. We wrote about whether Kindle is any good for this, including the claim about it that everyone repeats and that turns out to be false.

And if reading fragments is genuinely what you want, then this whole section doesn't apply, and Readlang at $6 is a very good deal.

Related reading

• The best apps for reading books in another language, the full comparison
• LingQ alternatives, if you've already decided to leave
• How to pick your first book in another language