Babbel Review

Purchasing a Babbel subscription gives you access to the entire learning library for a single language of your choice. If you want to learn a different language you will have to purchase another subscription.

How does Babbel work?

Babbel offers online courses through its mobile app. When you purchase a subscription, you receive full access to a library of pre-recorded video lessons for a language of your choice.

Before making a purchase, you must create a Babbel account and select a language. Babbel then asks you how much time you can dedicate to learning that language daily and what your current level of expertise with the language is. Based on your answers, it will draw from its library of courses and design a curriculum aimed at helping you achieve your target level of fluency by the end of your subscription period.

The Babbel Live subscription gives you unlimited access to live, instructor-led classes in your language of choice in addition to all of the features of the regular Babbel subscription. After signing up, you can access Babbel live classes in the Live section of the Babbel app and on the Babbel website. There, you will have access to a list of seminars showing the topic of the course, the name of the instructor, and the time and duration of the seminar. You can also take an optional, 3 minute placement quiz to determine which classes are right for your skill level. You have access to an unlimited number of live classes for the duration of your Babbel live subscription.

Is Babbel reliable and safe?

Babbel has outstanding reviews on Trustpilot, with only 6% of customers rating it less than four stars out of 17,966 reviews. Users seemed particularly pleased with the effectiveness of the app itself, with many customers saying it helped them pick up a language quickly.

At the time of this review Babbel has an F rating on Better Business Bureau (BBB), indicating that it is not BBB accredited. According to the BBB this is due to three unresolved complaints that have been filed against the business, and due to the length of time that the business has been operating—the BBB filing opened just one year ago, November 2020. Based on this information, we believe that Babbel is effective at its core purpose of teaching new languages and is safe to use.

What’s special about Babbel?

While Babbel’s core offering is similar to that of its competition, it has several features to enhance your learning. Free podcasts and videos provide insights into the nature of language in general and offer new perspectives on the experience of learning a new language.

Babbel’s blog, Babbel magazine, tells interesting stories about language and culture around the world. Lastly, Babbel’s pricing is, on the whole, slightly cheaper than that of competing products.

Bottom Line

Babbel provides an effective platform for learning new languages at a lower price point compared to its competition, and customers are highly satisfied with the quality of Babbel’s learning materials.

Although it is priced affordably, this pricing is per language. If you need to learn more than one language, some competitors offer multiple languages on a single subscription, which is cheaper. Additionally, customers complain regularly about the difficulty of canceling a subscription, so buyers must take care to cancel before renewal by contacting Babbel Support directly if they wish to terminate their subscription without any additional charges.

Overall, we consider Babbel to be effective at its intended goal of teaching customers a new language at a fair price point.