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FreeLingo vs Unihongo

Unihongo teaches only Japanese; FreeLingo teaches nine languages, Japanese among them. If Japanese is the goal and you want lots of speaking practice with an AI teacher, Unihongo is built for exactly that. FreeLingo is the broader, cheaper option, and the unusual thing about it is that the whole app is open source (AGPL-3.0), so you can run it yourself for free. People searching these names mostly want to know what each one is, so here's that.

What you practise

Unihongo is built around speaking. You talk with an AI teacher (AI Sensei) in a 3D classroom on 140 topics, pick its personality from gentle to strict, and do roleplay missions set in cafes, travel and work. There's also grammar, kanji, flashcards, kana games, pronunciation scoring and a chat companion called Mocchi.

FreeLingo is a general course: a level test, a study plan, lessons, grammar and vocabulary reference, spaced-repetition flashcards, listening and reading exercises, and voice conversations with an AI companion called Lingu. Its languages are English (UK and US), Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin.

What a month costs

Unihongo's free plan allows 1 minute 30 seconds of live conversation and 10 Mocchi messages a day. Basic is $8.90 a month for 15 minutes of speaking a day, Pro is $14.90 for 30 minutes and Max is $29.90 for 120 minutes. Basic and Pro come with a 3-day trial that needs a card.

FreeLingo's free plan keeps the level test, study plan, reference and flashcards, with chat, voice and exercises limited (the page doesn't give the caps). Premium shows €9.95 a month alongside a lower €5.95, and €99.50 a year alongside €59.50; the page doesn't say how long the lower prices last.

Running FreeLingo yourself

FreeLingo's repo (github.com/ArtCC/freelingo) installs with Docker Compose. You choose the language model (Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic or DeepSeek) and the speech stack: local Kokoro and faster-whisper on an NVIDIA GPU, or OpenAI's voice APIs. Voice needs HTTPS behind a reverse proxy. Unihongo has no self-hosted version.

FreeLingo: Pick FreeLingo if you're learning a European language or Korean or Mandarin, want a low monthly price, or want to host the app yourself.

Unihongo: Pick Unihongo if you're studying Japanese and the thing you need most is daily speaking time with an AI teacher.

Facts checked Oct 18, 2026 against 4 sources

Which one should you try?

FreeLingo

Freemium

Best for Self-directed learners practicing speaking skills without a human tutor

Visit FreeLingo See full review

Unihongo

Freemium

Best for Japanese language learners

Visit Unihongo See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

FreeLingo

FreeLingo

Freelingo pairs conversational AI chat with real-time voice feedback and spaced-repetition flashcards, covering the gap between passive study apps and expensive live tutoring. The free tier gives you lesson assessment and flashcards — which means you can gauge the tool before committing. Voice conversation and AI chat are paid-only features, so the free experience alone does not replicate a real practice session. Self-hosting is available, which matters for learners or institutions where sending conversation data to a third-party server is not acceptable. The ceiling arrives when a learner needs nuanced grammar correction mid-sentence or culturally specific idiom coaching that a scripted AI response cannot reliably provide.

Unihongo

Unihongo

The core loop is AI speaking practice across 48+ topic scenarios, with real-time corrections from a teacher persona you choose — strict, relaxed, funny, or gentle — inside a 3D classroom interface. The vendor states the AI adapts to your level and corrects in real time, which means you get targeted feedback instead of a generic pass/fail. Speed Test rooms add competitive pressure with timed random questions and a community ranking system. The skill-building question bank runs from N5 to N1 and covers grammar, vocabulary, listening, kanji, and reading. There is no API, no self-hosting, and no integration surface — this is a self-contained study tool, not a platform you pipe into anything else.

AttributeFreeLingoUnihongo
PricingFreemiumFreemium
PriceFree plan; Premium €9.95/month shown with €5.95 offer, or €99.50/year shown with €59.50 offerFree; Basic $8.90/mo; Pro $14.90/mo; Max $29.90/mo
Pricing checkedOct 19, 2026Oct 19, 2026
Free trial7 days3 days
Open sourceYesNo
Has APINoNo
Self-hosted optionYesNo
PlatformsWeb—
Pros
  • On-demand AI conversation practice with no scheduling requirement, so learners accumulate speaking hours without coordinating with another person's calendar.
  • Real-time pronunciation feedback during voice sessions, which means errors are caught in context rather than discovered after practice has already reinforced the wrong pattern.
  • Spaced-repetition flashcards integrated into the same platform, so vocabulary retention does not depend on a separate app that breaks the learning workflow.
  • Self-hosted deployment option, which means teams or institutions with data-residency requirements can run the platform without routing learner conversation data through the vendor's servers.
  • Free tier includes lesson assessment and flashcards, so a learner can evaluate whether the tool matches their level before unlocking voice and chat features.
  • AI conversation practice across 48+ topic scenarios with real-time correction, so you catch pronunciation and grammar errors in context rather than only discovering them on a test.
  • Teacher personality selection — strict, gentle, funny, or relaxed — so you can match the practice environment to the pressure level you need on a given day.
  • JLPT-structured question bank from N5 to N1 covering grammar, vocabulary, listening, kanji, and reading, so a learner at any stage has a mapped progression path without curating their own curriculum.
  • Timed Speed Test rooms with community rankings, so practice sessions include the time pressure that real exam conditions create — something solo flashcard study does not replicate.
  • In-context vocabulary capture from questions directly into flashcard decks, so new words land in a deck with the sentence context you first encountered them in, rather than as decontextualized definitions.
Cons
  • Voice and AI chat — the core practice features — are locked behind a paid subscription, so a learner testing the free tier cannot assess the quality of the conversation engine before committing; teams evaluating the tool for an institution cannot validate its primary value from the free access alone.
  • The AI conversation partner has no documented mechanism for adaptive curriculum adjustment based on a learner's specific error patterns over time; learners who need a tutor that notices recurring grammar mistakes across sessions and builds correction into future lessons will hit this wall and move to a platform with a human tutor component or a more structured adaptive engine.
  • No API is available, which means organisations wanting to embed Freelingo's conversation practice into an existing learning management system or internal training portal cannot do so programmatically — they are limited to directing learners to the standalone product.
  • The AI practice and question bank content are fixed within the platform — there is no way to add custom topics, upload your own materials, or tailor drills to a specific exam curriculum your school uses. Teachers or tutors building structured courses for students hit this wall immediately and move to a platform that accepts custom content.
  • No API and no data export means progress metrics, session history, and vocabulary decks exist only inside Unihongo. Any team or learner who needs to feed performance data into an LMS, a progress dashboard, or an external spaced-repetition system cannot do it — the data stays locked.
  • Advanced learners at N1 level who exhaust the question bank have no mechanism to extend the content pool beyond community-submitted questions. When community contribution volume is low in a given category, the available practice questions for high-level grammar points thin out quickly, and learners report returning to dedicated JLPT prep books or other services for that coverage.

Made up your mind?

FreeLingo

Freemium

Best for Self-directed learners practicing speaking skills without a human tutor

Visit FreeLingo See full review

Unihongo

Freemium

Best for Japanese language learners

Visit Unihongo See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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