Duolingo vs Memrise: The Best Language Learning Program

As is the nature of technology, a lot of things have changed since I last wrote product reviews or discussed my experiences with language learning apps or software and Duolingo vs Memrise is one of those toss-up questions everyone seems to have.

A few years ago I wrote reviews of both Memrise and Duolingo – actually more than one review of Memrise. But so much has changed with these apps and the companies that provide them in that time that rather than go back and edit the posts individually and totally overhaul them, it would be easier to just do another write-up and compare the two right here for you.

To paint a fair and even portrayal of each app I’ll do a brief rundown of each one, then do a more exhaustive feature comparison.

 

Memrise vs Duolingo

 

Memrise:

Of these two programs, Memrise has for many years been my top language learning app. I have been known to say generally positive things about Duolingo as well, but this has always played second chair to Memrise.

For a wildly outdated review of Memrise that goes into a little bit more specific detail about the program, you can find one here.

Memrise is an app and browser-based language learning platform designed by its eponymous company, located in London, England.

The program was originally based on the use of something called “mems”; images or phrases that are supposed to help words and grammar stick in our minds. It’s a really great system that I have always loved. It’s simple, elegant, and best of all it was mostly user generated. So, if you’re struggling with a word, you devise a fun way to remember it, you might upload an image to that particular word’s database and other users will see it as well. Crowd-sourced language learning – it’s perfect. Things have changed a bit in recent years for mobile users, but that’s the gist of it.

 

Pros:

• Covers a decent number of learning needs including reading, writing and listening
• Competitive system including points earned and leaderboards featuring friends or others you wish to follow
• A mobile app that is convenient, fun and a great way to spend time learning a language during downtime or from your bed
• Multiple additional learning options including grammar study, timed tests, a difficult word bank and even a voice recording system
• User generated content allows for a wide variety of available courses featuring practically every topic you can imagine, and many you can’t.1There’s a course on identifying the different symbols found on laundry tags around the word. I shit you not.
• A fun and highly effective system (mems) designed to optimize your ability to remember vocabulary
• Amazingly large selection of languages including conlangs, ancient and dead languages, endangered languages and essentially everything else thanks to courses being user-created.
• Exceptional classroom functionality including private, custom courses teachers can very easily create for their students based on their specific coursework
• Non-language materials are also available. You can learn everything from geography to math to art history and genetic code.
• Very cool camera-identifying dictionary tool for mobile devices
• It’s free. (Unless you want the app).

 

Cons:

• The mobile app is no longer free and does not provide access to courses generated by users anymore. A new app for that is in development but there is no release date.
• Mobile app does not make use of “mems”, which was kind of the point of Memrise
• No real speaking component. It does have a voice recording option for self-assessment, but it’s not comparable to other programs.
• They recently re-branded their company with with a weird-as-shit ugly yellow and it now looks like the vomit of a 1970s Sesame Street Muppet.

 

Premium pros:

• Great tracking and statistical analysis of learning habits and best practices (browser version)
• Access to full, high quality Memrise-created courses on mobile app
• The ability to download courses to your device for offline use

 

Premium cons:

• It’s around $9 per month or $59 per year.
• It’s mandatory for using the app.
• Extra features may not really justify the price for most users.
• Many added benefits, such as usage tracking and analysis, are really only available on the desktop version.

 

Overall, Memrise is still pretty good and the pros mostly outweigh the cons. The biggest drawback has to do with the huge changes to the app and its inaccessibility to non-paying users. Not nice.

 

Duolingo

Much like Memrise, Duolingo is a browser and mobile language learning platform with a lot of similar characteristics. It hails from the United States – Pittsburgh to be precise – and was created by Carnegie Mellon’s Luis Von Ahn, a professor there and the inventor of those reCAPTCHA things that make sure you’re an organic life form before logging into things. He then sold it to Google and is basically considered a founding father of crowdsourcing.

Fancy.

Anyway Duolingo has a lot of green and features an owl mascot that somehow manages to answer the question: what would happen if you somehow bred your weird aunt’s parakeet with Jack the Ripper?

 

Pros:

• Reasonably capable of providing reading, writing, listening and speaking thanks to basic voice recognition tech
• Covers a vast range of subjects within each language, which are well separated and easy to select from (animals, food, future tense, business terminology, etc.)
• Features a weekly tournament-style competition against other learners in a similar skill bracket to your own2It’s maddeningly addictive. I came out of Duolingo retirement just to pwn n00bz online while waving my flashy LATG globe avatar all over the place. Fight me.
• A gamification strategy that offers points in the form of “lingots” that can be exchanged for items in the Duolingo “store”.
• A fun mascot that has served as the source for countless memes, tweets, nightmares and other forms of online entertainment
• Progressive company with cutesie artwork prominently featuring LGBT couples and minorities
• Features a decent selection of languages including:
  • German
  • English
  • Polish
  • Spanish
  • French
  • Portuguese
  • Japanese
  • Chinese (I presume Mandarin)
  • Russian
  • Korean
  • Dutch
  • Swedish
  • Norwegian
  • Turkish
  • Irish
  • Greek
  • Hebrew
  • Danish
  • Hindi
  • Czech
  • Esperanto
  • Ukrainian
  • Welsh
  • Vietnamese
  • Hungarian
  • Swahili
  • Romanian
  • Indonesian
  • Hawaiian
  • Navajo
  • Klingon
  • High Valyrian31.2 million people are studying High fucking Valyrian. I wonder how they’re going to feel when after the series finale they realize it’s a dead language.
  • It also features numerous courses for speakers of other languages, such as English and Spanish for Chinese speakers, etc. English is available for most major source languages.4Pro-tip: if you’re working on two languages at once, set the app to use one of them as its default then choose the second as the course to learn. Kill two clowns with one motorcycle!

• Ability to test out of sections that you may already be beyond
• Simple-to-follow study guide available for each section including explanations, listening practice, and other useful information
• Basic discussion forums for each word or phrase where users can share memory tips or complain about the weather
• “Stories” option (browser version only) provides you with some really useful reading comprehension sessions with audio that might give you flashbacks of your SATs.
• A general forums (browser version only) where you can communicate with other learners
• It’s free (premium also available)

 

Cons

• Repetitive AF
• Does not teach words or grammar prior to asking for it – trial and error
• Not ideal for more advanced learners (B1+ might find it a bit dull).
• Mobile app (non-premium) features an advertisement after each lesson and constant pestering for premium upgrade
• The lingot store is practically worthless
• Sometimes the sentences seem to be made by pulling random words out of a hat, i.e. “my horse collects teeth”.

 

Premium pros:

• Downloadable courses for use offline
• No advertisements in the mobile version
• Lets you save your success streaks
• “Custom tailored” quizzes
• One week free for upgraded users

 

Premium cons:

• Expensive
• Essentially no appealing additional features whatsoever

 

Duolingo is a fair balance of good and not so great features. Overall, there isn’t a lot about it that screams “bad”, but if the best thing a reviewer can say about something is that it’s not bad, that’s not great, right?

While less convenient, for the best learning experience, I would recommend using the browser version. It’s easier with a full keyboard and there are additional cool features, particularly “Stories”. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be available to some users operating their accounts in languages other than English.

 

Let’s break these aspects down point by point

 

Skills covered

I like to think of language learning products in terms of four separate categories; reading, writing, listening and speaking. I consider any product that only covers 1 or 2 of these to be a “secondary” resource, whereas one that features 3 or 4 could be considered a primary resource.

Both Duolingo and Memrise offer reasonable reading and writing opportunities. They’re basic, but they’re not bad. When it comes to listening, each program also does fairly well. Each phrase in both is narrated by a native speaker.

Do note, though, that some user-generated Memrise courses do not feature audio or other features. Adding these is up to the creators and some simply choose not to do so. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they lack decent microphones. Maybe they hate how their voices sound on recordings like the rest of us. Regardless, the company-made courses created by Memrise itself all feature high-quality audio lessons and even show videos of native speakers pronouncing the words, which is great for hearing different accents.

As for speaking, Duolingo does feature a voice recognition feature, but it is limited in its scope. Memrise, unfortunately, does not. What it offers instead is a system of recording your pronunciation for further self-assessment. It is not judged by a machine or a person, just you. As far as speaking practice, I don’t think it quite counts.

Overall, in this arena my point goes to Duolingo for covering all 4 basic needs to some degree.

 

Languages and subjects offered

Memrise is the clear and indisputable winner here due to its user-created content.  Memrise is truly the all-you-can-eat buffet of language learning material. Whether you want to learn something outrageously specific like vocabulary necessary for med students taking a specific course at a certain university in Uzbekistan, or something a bit more broad like, I dunno, French, you can do so with countless different courses. You can learn virtually anything you can imagine including endangered languages, obscure languages from Papua New Guinea, conlangs from Tolkien’s novels or Game of Thrones, and many more.

Super important note on Memrise**: In the rebranding process, Memrise has created a separate website to house its user generated courses. Users can still log in using their Memrise accounts and access everything from before. The new website is called “Decks” and can be found at https://decks.memrise.com. Currently there is no new app for this. According to their website, one should be released later this year. In the meantime, things are rough for non-paying users because the only way to access all of these courses is through their browser version. Memrise’s in-house mobile app courses will now be paid. Bummer.

Duolingo does still provide a pretty great selection of languages by most companies’ standards. These include Hawaiian and Navajo, for which I give a lot of credit. It’s nice to see a major platform such as Duolingo using its popularity to boost their visibility. Historically, Duo didn’t support Asian languages or others that didn’t use Latin script, but those days have long since passed and if you skipped this app years ago because it didn’t offer Russian or Japanese, you’re in luck – it does now.

Regardless, though, despite its app issues, Memrise still wins by a wide margin due to its very nature. If you’re learning an obscure language or one with few resources available, Memrise is going to be your best friend, and hopefully we see the user generated content that provides these languages restored to mobile soon.

Point Memrise!

 

Quality of mobile app

I use both companies’ mobile apps, though I would be lying if I didn’t say that I have historically used Memrise way more. I would argue that in both cases the browser versions hold several advantages, but in the age of mobile, I’d bet money on more people using the mobile versions, more often.

Both companies’ apps are slimmed-down versions of their browser platforms. They both offer a somewhat smaller selection of features and typing on a tiny little screen isn’t always convenient for those of us with gigantic sausage fingers.

Both apps are pretty well put together and I’ve had virtually no significant technical issues with either one.

The Memrise app features a camera-identification feature. You simply point your phone’s camera at an object and it will identify it and translate it into the language you’re studying. It’s not perfect, makes a lot of mistakes, and doesn’t seem to recognize anything that isn’t super obvious, but it’s still cool, freaky tech and a ton of fun to play with.

Overlooking the pay-to-play model, when it comes simply to quality and offerings, I think I’ll give this point to Memrise as well because it offers more services on its app and features no advertisements. The downside is that unless you upgrade to Memrise Pro, the app doesn’t have much to offer at the moment. The Decks mobile app is set to be released “later this year”. So in the meantime, sit tight and cry a bit.

Major temporary edit*** As of this edit (June 5, 2019), Memrise’s app appears to be allowing me access to the user-created courses I had been using before, so you should check it out too. I messaged them to find out what was up with that and have yet to hear a response. If this is something they brought back, that’d be amazing. It is also not clear to me at this time whether these courses would require users to have Memrise Pro to access them. I made a new account to see what was missing for standard users (I am a Pro user) and it appears that you can no longer pursue new user generated courses, but if you were working on them from before, they seem to appear. I do not know if they carry over from the desktop version of Decks, but I would love to find out!

 

Gamification

Both programs feature some form of social competition measured by leaderboards.

With both Duolingo and Memrise, you are given the ability to “follow” learners who you may know as friends or family, or course creators and top-“scorers” on the courses you’re pursuing, or random language bloggers you just find interesting enough to follow. This doesn’t really inspire a great deal of competition, but if you’re the kind of person who likes tracking points and are motivated by numbers, this is a perk that both offer. Duolingo also features a few (very basic) “achievements” such as doing a lesson between 4 and 8 AM or getting a 30 consecutive day streak.

Duolingo offers these shockingly competitive weekly tournament-style events in which users are randomly assigned to different groups of 50 learners from around the world. These users then compete to be in the top ten based on points accumulated to move on to the next “tier”, where the competition is slightly higher. The top three in a given week’s tournament are awarded 20, 10 and 5 “lingots” respectively, which can be used to buy stuff in the Duolingo store.

Unfortunately, that’s about as far as Duolingo’s point system goes.

While winning itself may be a point of pride for many, including me, I have mixed feelings about the gamification of language learning apps. You can read about that here. The lingots that you win in Duolingo are practically worthless. There are only a couple of items you can even buy in the store.

These items include two outfits – a tux and a weird gold tracksuit – for Duo to wear during your lessons, yay. Users can also buy very short modules on slang and romance/dating. Lastly, you can use lingots to buy “streak freezes”, in case you want to maintain your streak but know you’ll be away for a day and be unable to play. Lastly, you can wager lingots in order to double them after a week-long period. The browser version lets you buy timed practice quizzes. Otherwise, that’s it. That’s all. There’s no more.

After you’ve bought all of these things, you’ll notice that you’re still accumulating lingots at a fairly rapid pace and there’s nowhere else to spend them. It’s kind of a pointless system and I hope they add new features, but it has been years now and nothing new has come up. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Back to Memrise – if you pay for the Pro version you will have unlimited access to timed tests, which are surprisingly fun. You pair the words as quickly as you can before time runs out, and accumulate more and more points as you go.

Over all, I’ve got to give this one to Duolingo. Despite the stupid lingots and store, the competition part is more addictive than I expected and I frequently find myself working my ass off late Sunday night to pass people at the last minute. It sends you annoying little messages reminding you that someone passed you and it makes my blood boil to the point where I will actually drop what I’m doing, sit down on the couch, and spend half an hour racking up points with a righteous fury.

The struggle is very, very real.

 

The cost of premium

Both programs’ basic features are totally free for their browser versions and Duolingo’s app is as well. Technically, there’s no real reason for you not to use both programs if you see fit, but if you’re looking to pay for a premium upgrade of one or the other, this section is the true Duolingo vs Memrise deal.

Duolingo Plus and Memrise Pro are both premium, paid upgrades that you can commit real-life money to in exchange for a couple extra features and conveniences.

The Memrise Pro version costs $9 per month or $59 per year.

Duolingo Plus costs $10 per month, $47.99 for 6 months, or $79.99 for a year. It features a 1 week free trial.

Neither is super cheap when you break down what it is, but Memrise comes out way on top here for not only being less expensive, but being packed with far more features. But, you have to pay for it if you want to access any of it on mobile.

There is no information yet about whether the Decks app will be free or not when it is released.

Duolingo’s Plus option, on the other hand is the most obvious and unappealing cash grab I’ve ever seen in a language learning product. I don’t dislike Duolingo, but damn guys, you want me to pay $80 for an app with no advertisements? You want me to pay you so you can give me quizzes? Isn’t literally every level already a quiz? Do I look like I want to pay for pain and suffering? Don’t you think my student loan debt is bad enough? (Patreon)

Both Duolingo and Memrise premium versions do offer you the ability to download the courses you’re working on for offline use, which is really nice, especially if you travel a lot.5Fun trick: if you sign up for Duolingo Plus you get a free week. Do that, download your course, then cancel your trial before they charge you. Pretty sure you get to keep it as long as you don’t delete it.

Memrise wins through and through in just about every single aspect here. No contest.

 

Company quality and overall image

Memrise:

This one is a big one for me personally.

Because of what I do with LATG, I try to pay a lot of attention to the companies behind the language learning products I love (or hate) and keep an eye on their social media and newsletters and updates, etc.

Memrise has long been a (very) casual acquaintance of LATG. I’ve been in touch with them since LATG was formed and they were a fledgling company. I’ve had calls from them regarding their premium release, and I’ve just generally always had a good time with this company. They maintain a fun and engaging social media presence that isn’t obnoxiously self promotional.

They have become a big kid now and no longer want to play with me, but I still respect them as a company and have nothing but good things to say in this regard.

Except that I do:

This year (2019, if you’re reading this in the distant future), Memrise went to great lengths to overhaul its entire brand, something I’ve mentioned already.

 

What this has meant:

• The browser site has had all user-created content moved to a separate website called decks.memrise.com. Both the site and app now only feature Memrise’s official courses.
• The mobile app is no longer free. It has gone full Babbel and now only offers a single, not very helpful lesson before requiring a paid upgrade for more.
• Browser users can still access the full courses for free. For now.
• A new mobile app, also called Decks, is supposed to be released later in 2019, but we have yet to hear any details about whether it will be paid or free or indeed exist at all.

People are noooooot happy about this and a quick pop over the Google Maps and a click on their business indicates a 2.2 star rating. I flicked through a few reviews and they’re all basically freaking out about what happened. It really hit teachers, whose courses were significantly impacted.

So, you know all that good shit I’ve been saying about Memrise? Mobile users unwilling to upgrade can forget about it. If it weren’t for these changes, I wouldn’t have even bothered writing this article because Memrise would be the winner hands down.

I will update accordingly when I know more about their plans or when something is released.

But even worse than all of that: they made their entire brand yellow.

Not happy, sunshiney yellow, but this horrible, baby-shit, jaundice yellow.

 

Duolingo:

Duolingo is huge and has been for years. This company is so big they surely do not know my name nor would they care in the slightest if I steered a fistful of their potential customers away by saying that their Plus version is worse bonus content than the dental floss your dentist used to leave in your goodie bag after each appointment.

Their social media presence is pretty lame. They mostly just post stupid questions from their own courses that nobody cares about. They’re impersonal and don’t really communicate with fans at all.

However, what they do have going for them is Duo himself and what meme culture has done with him.

If there were an animal mascot for language learning, Duo, that big-eyed little green owl would be it. But the Internet has run with him and turned him into the Ghost of Languages. Due largely to his incessant mobile notifications, always reminding you when you need to do your daily lesson, sometimes sending texts with creepy lines or images, he has become an endless source of mock-terror, and it’s really great.

 

This is just a taste of the crazy stuff people have come up with. Here’s a list of more.

Duolingo is also famous for producing some phrases in its lessons that are totally nonsensical. Lines such as or “the roof is made of dogs” are common and there’s actually a Twitter account called @shitduosays that exists solely to parody Duolingo and publish silly screenshots from the app’s randomly generated sentences.

On the brighter side, both companies espouse generally positive, progressive business models, seem highly inclusive and diverse as employers, and profoundly seem to try to make the world a better place.6Unless Duo turns out to be an actual serial killer. If that happens I will revise this article accordingly.

Overall, I have to go with a tie. Memrise sold its soul, and Duo never had one to begin with.

 

Overall effectiveness as a learning tool

All in all, both programs are sure to offer language learners something.

Both programs offer a mixture of word matching and sentence creation.

Memrise first introduces you to a word, then tests you on your memory of that word. Using spaced repetition, that word will reappear throughout the lesson. As a course progresses, the words often become fully-fleshed phrases.

Duolingo operates similarly, but does not start by providing users with the words, grammar or other info. You’re simply thrown into the deep end to sink or swim. After a bit of sinking you will begin to float, but it’s a little bit annoying at first when you get a word that you’ve never seen before wrong because you didn’t know the proper article. Not really fair.

It does, however, feature a reasonably easy-to-follow guide (it’s that tiny light bulb you’ve probably been ignoring) that will help explain some things fairly well.

Duolingo also relies on a lot of repetition. It comes to the point where were I not winning points, I would give up because it asks the same questions over and over and over, dozens or even hundreds of times.

Luckily, Duolingo also features an option to test out of a section. If you already know the basics of German, you don’t have to go through “Das Bier…. bitte, hallo, ja, nein” etc.7Pro-tip for more experienced learners: Duolingo never really gets super hard and the top levels are maybe B1 – early B2 is pushing it. If you’re already somewhat proficient at your language, even A1 or 2, just test through each section as far as you can until you’ve unlocked everything. Then you can go back to each section as you see fit. Don’t do this if you’re new! It’s easy to abuse the test feature.

Sometimes, the translations, particularly with Duolingo, can be very, very literal, to the point of seeming very strange to fluent speakers.

Just yesterday I had the phrase “The pasta comes from Italy”. To which I replied: “Die Nudeln Kommt aus Italien”. Apparently I was incorrect and was then informed that it should be “Die Nudeln sind aus Italien”. For non-German speakers, this is the difference between “comes from” and “is from”, which are usually equally valid in English. Correct me, German speakers, if I am wrong, but I was told that my way would be more common, though neither is expressly wrong.

Despite that minor shortcoming, it can be a toss-up and sometimes Duo gets it right. It does have the ability to recognize many typos and alternative ways of saying thing. If I have to translate “The children are hungry”, I get full points whether I type “Die Kinder haben Hunger” or “Die Kinder sind hungrig.” And if for some reason I type “Die Kindwr haben Hungdr” it will condescendingly inform me that I made a typo, but grants me credit anyway.

But, don’t get too comfy with this flexibility. It’s still best to be careful with the button mashing.

However, Memrise’s course quality, particularly with its user-generated courses – is not always as reliable as Duolingo’s. Despite some claims that Duolingo’s courses have their errors – as they surely do – Memrise, by its very nature, has a lot of content that is not always made by professionals or even native speakers. While their in-house courses are fairly reliable, in this case, Duolingo may be a little bit more trustworthy.

I think that Memrise is the more effective tool for language learning overall, so they get this point. The reason is that its use of spaced repetition and variation makes its courses more diverse and easier to process than Duolingo’s. Memrise focuses on image association (Not image/word pairings such as those that Rosetta Stone offers, which are awful) and the use of mnemonics, which gives it a huge edge over Duo’s rote recitation.

I have probably learned quite a bit more with Memrise over the years, but that may be primarily because I use it a hell of a lot more. I am currently on a Duolingo kick, and I am seeing some minor results, so we’ll see how that goes and I’ll edit this if it really seems to pay off.

 

Extras and fun stuff

Duolingo vs Memrise is a pretty tight race and it really does have to come down to the nitty-gritty here.

Duo’s “Stories” feature is a lot of fun and is something that Memrise simply does not offer in the same sense. These stories, available on the browser version, feature a dialogue between two speakers. It is then up to you to determine what they’re talking about, much like a reading comprehension lesson. Fill in the blanks, and otherwise follow the story. You can mouse over a given word that you don’t know for its translation. It’s slow-going, it’s helpful, and the stories are way less lame than I expected them to be.

The last one I finished was an exchange between two women, one of whom was trying to rent an apartment from the other. As the story progresses it turns out that they’re dating the same man. Spoiler: she doesn’t get the apartment.

Duolingo’s browser also provides additional “extras” such as a list of “meet up” opportunities for language learners, courses or other sorts of get-togethers in your area where you can meet real people. It has a podcast, a flashcards feature, as well as its own dictionary to help you out. Its app does not feature any of this.

Memrise doesn’t really actually offer any of that.

What Memrise does offer, however, is a camera-identification tool. You simply point your phone camera at an object and it will automatically recognize and provide you with the word right there on the screen. It’s not especially reliable because technology like this is not the most refined, nor is Memrise the first to do this. Still, it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s nice to have, though I have to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever actually used it in a real situation. I just forget it’s there.

It also provides a grammar exercise in which users can “speak” to an AI in a mock-texting conversation. It’s basic and I don’t love it, but it exists and is as close to Duo’s “Stories” as it gets.

Overall, point to Duolingo. This is in large part due to its ability to connect people with others in their area for language interaction and promotes local events. This is huge and not something most programs make part of their offerings.

 

Functionality as a classroom teaching tool

In the era of digitalization in the classroom, the use of mobile apps or computer programs is bigger than ever and teachers are increasingly capitalizing on students’ phone addictions and tech savvy.

Both Duolingo and Memrise do offer some form of classroom functionality.

Duolingo allows users to sync up to a “group” in order for a teacher to track learner progress. It’s a nifty tool and while I haven’t personally used it, as I am neither a teacher nor a student, it appears to be freely available.

Memrise, on the other hand, offers the world to teachers. Mostly.

The ability to create custom courses allows teachers to make entire private (or public) Memrise courses comprised of the vocabulary or grammar exercises students are studying in their textbooks or that might be required for state exams or really anything they’d like. Students can create accounts and receive private invitations to these courses where they can then compete against one another and can have their progress tracked by their teacher, all in one place.

Better yet, once the course is made, you can always just use it again next year! It also exposes students to Memrise as a platform and many may start using it to independently study other languages or find other courses to their liking. Once again, though, there’s a huge downside. As of this writing, the mobile app “Decks” has not yet been released, so while teachers can have their students access their courses using computers either in school or at home, the mobile option is not an option.

All in all, Memrise wins, hands down, especially once that app is up and running.

 

Conclusion

Those are the major pros and cons of Duolingo and Memrise and how the breakdowns work.

To summarize:

 

Resources offered: Duolingo

Languages offered: Memrise

Mobile app: Tie 

Gamification: Duolingo

Premium version cost/benefit: Memrise

Company: Memrise

Reliability of course quality: Duolingo

Overall effectiveness as a learning tool: Memrise

Useful extras: Duolingo

Classroom functionality: Memrise

 

Overall: Memrise, but only by a hair.