Babbel vs Rosetta Stone: Which One is Really Better?
**Please note** As of November 2019, this article is somewhat dated. It was written in 2016 and is in need of an update or twelve. I hope to get to this relatively soonish. It is my understanding that both products have expanded their services to some extent, which is to be expected. However, from what I understand, these points remain more or less the same, so I’d like to think this review remains somewhat relevant. If you know of any specific changes that were not made here, please feel free to leave a comment!
You’re looking to learn a new language. You’ve got a big, fat wad of cash you want to dump on something you believe will help you to learn this new language. Where do you go from here?
Babbel vs Rosetta Stone is one of those ages-old clashes of the Titans that really gets me kind of irritated. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you know that I dislike expensive products in general and have limited fondness for either program.
The first thing you need to know about making a language product purchase is that nothing is perfect. Most of it isn’t even good.
But you’re looking for a real answer, once and for all, to this, the biggest question in language tool comparisons. What good would I be if I couldn’t deliver a somewhat satisfactory answer?
To be really straight forward about this; I generally dislike both Babbel and Rosetta Stone. I find them to be representative of everything an obnoxious, oversold, exploitative moneymaking machine should be.
But I’m not going to give you the holier-than-thou language blogger speech of “everything is bad, learn by yourself with books and travel!” You’ve probably heard it all already, and I know you probably already have your heart set on a big language purchase.
Hopefully I can help you to make the decision that works best for you.
Let’s get into it.
Rosetta Stone vs Babbel, How do they work?
Let’s start with Rosetta
Rosetta Stone is the largest, most well known, household name language learning product on the planet – and for good reason.
For decades they’ve vomited millions into advertising campaigns the world over, developing for themselves a celebrity status among adult education products and wealthy business travelers and jet setters just about everywhere.
Conversely, Rosetta Stone is also the punching bag of the language learning software world and seems almost universally despised by bloggers, veteran language learners and language educators alike.
I think we all just love to hate Rosetta. I’d say that this is an unfair treatment of a product – many of us just hate it because it’s famous. However, I’ve used it myself, both as a learner and an educator, and I can comfortably state to you that the most valuable thing I think you’ll get from your purchase is a really sturdy yellow box you can keep office supplies in.1
Both Babbel and Rosetta Stone are what I would refer to as a “primary language resource”. This means that they cover 3 or 4 out of what I consider the primary language learning aspects to be; reading, writing, speaking and listening. Products that only cover 2 are what I refer to as “secondary” learning products.
The four categories are reading, writing, speaking and listening.
So, what are the pros and cons of Rosetta?
Pros
- Covers wide selection of learning needs. (Primary resource). Units on listening, reading, writing and speaking. All 4 – so that’s a good start.
- Newer versions offer real online tutoring with a human or a very talented android.
- Voice recognition AI is pretty advanced for what it is.
- It now comes with a mobile app to accompany subscriptions.
- Classroom modules are available that include networking software. This allows custom course creation and educator monitoring of individual user progress.
- Seriously, it’s a really nice box.
- 30+ Languages offered, including some less common ones like Vietnamese and Pashto. Listed below.
Cons
- Prohibitively expensive for the average learner.
- The classroom module is ridiculously, prohibitively, exorbitantly, nauseatingly expensive.
- The free trial gives a horrible impression of the product. Then again, most do.
- Mobile app isn’t actually very good.
- Personal tutoring, while available, is limited in scope and frequency of availability.
- Picture/word matching is, in my opinion, one of the worst learning techniques available.
- Functions as a crutch for learners.
- The tech support isn’t the best.
- Older versions are extremely limited in their functionality and do not age well.
- Relatively ineffective for the majority of users.
- The furious desire to scrub your infected hard drive with something antibacterial.
Rosetta offers a fairly diverse list of languages including a few that can be sort of difficult to find resources for. Dari, Pashto, Farsi, Latin, Urdu and Swahili all make the list. As much as I dislike Rosetta Stone, it’s kind of hard to argue with resources for those languages. They aren’t especially common and if you have lots of money burning a hole in your pocket, it’s not likely to make you worse.
RS is available in:
- Arabic
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- Dari
- Dutch
- English (American)
- English (British)2
- Filipino (Tagalog)
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Indonesian
- Irish
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latin
- Pashto
- Persian (Farsi)
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish (Latin America)
- Spanish (Spain)
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Turkish
- Urdu
- Vietnamese
Newer versions of Rosetta are available as downloads or as browser programs and apps. 3
It’s clear that I’m a bit biased here. I’ve used RS’s classroom function in the past – albeit with an older version – and you can read all about how much of a colossal waste of money that was for our vastly underfunded program. If you have experience with RS in the classroom with a newer version, please let me know how it worked in the comments!
When I say that Rosetta becomes a crutch, what I mean is that despite now having a decent voice system and the potential for tutoring sessions, most users won’t take advantage of these to the extent that they should. It has been my experience that the majority of users come in, avoid human interaction, use Rosetta like it’s a game. “Beat the game”. But are otherwise never capable of engaging in conversation.
It should be noted that this same argument could be said of many software products. I think the best course of action has to be a blend of human interaction with software or mobile apps because these things really do make it easy to convince yourself that you’re making progress when all you’re really doing is beating a game.
I’m sure that Rosetta has helped some people, and there are real studies that support this – which I go into in more detail here – but by and large I do not believe the returns to be worth the investment.
Babbel
Babbel is a considerably newer, more web-based program that similarly offers a relatively wide spectrum of learning resources, with a few major differences. It still employs many of the same techniques, such as the picture/word matching that I so despise, but compensates for it with some pretty nifty features that are hard to argue with.
Pros
- Covers wide selection of learning needs. (Primary resource). Units on listening, reading, writing.
- Much more community orientation. Unlike RS, Babbel helps you to connect with other learners or native speakers.
- Has a mobile app. Still not great but better than RS.
- Website and dashboard are easy to follow and use.
- Offers a simple selection of courses of varying difficulty.
- Appropriate for users with some prior experience.
- A bit more affordable than Rosetta.
- Mixes exercises and doesn’t focus solely on picture/word matching
Cons
- No serious spoken component as of this writing.
- It may be cheaper than RS, but it’s still not great.
- The free trial is an absolute joke that offers too limited an idea of the program’s capabilities.
- Very limited language selection
- It still uses picture/word matching. Ugh.
- Offers only European languages and Indonesian.
Babbel is available in
So, let’s break it down
Let’s make the comparison a little bit more clear. According to a number of factors that I find valuable in assessing the cost effectiveness and worth of a language learning program, let’s see where the points go:
- Cost – Babbel
- Free trial – Tie
- Ease of setup and use – Babbel
- Classroom functionality – Rosetta Stone
- Language selection – Rosetta Stone
- Spoken component – Rosetta Stone
- Written component – Rosetta Stone
- Listening component – Tie
- Reading component – Tie
- Quality of mobile app – Tie
- Customer service and support – Babbel
- Company profile and reputation – Babbel4
- Human interaction – Babbel
- Customization – Rosetta Stone
- Overall cost effectiveness – Babbel
Cost
Babbel’s cost is vastly lower than Rosetta’s. Babble is currently only available in blocks of 3, 6 and 12 month subscriptions. It comes to about $24 if billed every 3 months, $40 if billed every 6 months, and $75 if billed yearly. These rates are higher now than they were when this piece was originally written. Despite the moderate price hike, it’s still a fairly reasonable rate for a program like this and vastly defeats its competitor.
Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, starts at $124 per level of each language. There are 5 levels. If you want them all that’s going to add up super quickly. RS also offers online subscriptions at 6 month, ($119), 12 month ($179) and 24 month ($250) rates. Classroom packages such as the one we used to use in our English lab can run into the thousands for just a few copies. The office management and customizer software is additionally pricey.
Point to Babbel
Free trial
Not everyone may agree with me, but I believe that a product’s free trial program should actually give potential buyers a good sense of the program. I personally prefer time-bound trials, such as a week or two weeks, etc, rather than a single lesson – which is what both of these offer. They are also limited to the most introductory words such as “yes, no, hello, excuse me, and beer”. If you’re at any level above the absolute greenest learner, you’ll roll your eyes and go elsewhere. I prefer to learn something during a trial – that gives me an idea as to whether I’ll learn anything by continuing.
Both programs’ trials leave users somewhat bewildered. If you want to hook me on a free trial try actually teaching me something, Give me something worth pursuing further. Don’t waste my time “teaching” me 8 excruciatingly basic words.
These programs tie here. Both are super lame.
Ease of use
The Rosetta software used to be an absolute nightmare to set up and use. It came with poor instructions, had convoluted installation processes and absurd license code management. RS was not compatible with many older operating systems or computers, and just generally caused a lot of problems. It had poor tutorials and was rather difficult to figure out. Modern Rosetta editions are a little bit easier to work with thanks to their online nature, but still fall short of Babbel’s simplicity. Tech support, which we’ll get to, wasn’t much help here.
Babbel is much easier to use. Everything you need to do is right there on the dashboard. It offers a concise, simple tutorial with tool-tips that guide you through everything you need to know.
Point to Babbel!
Language selection
This point goes to Rosetta Stone, hands down. Babbel doesn’t even come close to reaching the same number of languages. Rosetta includes some relatively rare languages such as Pashto, Dari and Swahili.
Babbel doesn’t include any Asian languages other than Indonesian, which uses Latin script. They do offer Russian, at least, but otherwise I have to assume this has something to do with the complexity of using other writing systems. Clearly other companies make it work. Sorry Babbel, you lose this one.
Point Rosetta.
Classroom functionality
Despite being ludicrously expensive, Rosetta Stone’s classroom functionality wins out here. Babbel doesn’t really have an option for this. RS allows for a lot more personalization. Instructors can individually customize each student’s exercises based on their skill level or which aspects of language learning they require more help with. They will also be able to read, analyze and even print reports for grading or other purposes. This was fairly handy as a program coordinator at our TESOL agency.
Teachers could recommend that students use Babbel, and institutions could perhaps pay for subscriptions, but ultimately the monitoring features and the course customization offered by Rosetta easily win this category.
Ding, ding, ding Rosetta!
Reading, writing, speaking and listening
Because it offers personalized tutoring and a very high quality AI with pretty solid voice recognition that has only improved as time has passed, Rosetta Stone wins the majority of these categories. This is a big win for Rosetta as it sort of underscores the quality of the overall program. It’s certainly more responsive to voice input than my Alexa is.
The listening and reading components are about the same though.
Babbel keeps up admirably in this regard and despite losing to RS here, it still handles most of these (other than speaking, which it doesn’t do so well with) quite well.
Point Rosetta!
Quality of mobile app
I’m really not a fan of either of these mobile apps. They’re clunky, slow, convoluted and of course totally useless without a subscription, making their functionality highly reduced.
Some reduction in functionality is to be expected with any program’s mobile version, or at least it used to be. Unfortunately, if you’re expecting people to be shelling out real money for this stuff, your product had better not only be mobile friendly, but mobile dominant.
Thankfully, mobile apps backed by large companies usually improve frequently. If you’re looking for a mobile app I do like, try checking out Memrise.
I give Babbel and Rosetta a tie.
Customer support and service
In 2012, I reached out a number of times to Rosetta Stone’s customer service for help diagnosing some installation issues we were having in our language labs. This mostly had to do with the verification of some license codes that for some reason were missing from our delivered products. Not helpful.
I spent months exchanging info, repeating questions, making phone calls, filling out forms and dealing with tech service guys who really had no idea what they were doing nor little interest in doing their damn jobs. I hope things have changed since then, but first impressions matter.
On the other hand, Babbel has reached out to me a couple of times and are always very fast to respond to questions or concerns. They wanted me to review their product on its own, and even offered a 3 month subscription for free, but as I was actually already familiar with their product, and wasn’t thrilled, I declined. Perhaps this was done out of some sort of nobility, but I didn’t want to take their product then turn around and say I wasn’t thrilled.
In retrospect, shouldn’t ever say no to free language stuff.
Regardless of me, Babbel’s customer service and team as a whole seem genuinely interested in the success of their users, listen to feedback, and are quick with their responses. They actually shared this post once, which was ballsy on their part.
Big, fat point to Babbel.
Company profile and reputation
Rosetta Stone is clearly the bigger, more well known of the two – though Babbel is no shrimp either. Babbel is officially endorsed by the European Union – which, while I may not have made the same decision here, is a pretty fancy-schmancy tidbit to add to a CV.
Rosetta has a reputation for being overly salesy, impersonal and rigid. Furthermore, if you went around to every major language blogger, I guarantee you that most of them would have generally negative words for Rosetta Stone.5 Like I said earlier, maybe it’s unfair, but we love to hate RS. Clearly they aren’t very good at PR.
Babbel, on the other hand, is highly active on social media and is constantly offering quality articles, entertaining memes and images and actually dialogues with its users. Rosetta Stone posts purely promotional garbage or patronizingly simple questions that are little more than not-so-cleverly-hidden sales plugs.
Furthermore, as I said above, they actually reached out to me about doing a review of their product back in 2015. They were super cool to chat with and that certainly reflected positively.
Maybe this is because Babbel is a younger, (slightly) lower profile product, but it seems to me that Rosetta Stone is comfortable not appealing to its users in a PR sense. It’s too big to fail and doesn’t really care what you think. And they will probably never read this review, or acknowledge that I exist.
….Not that my vanity is a determining factor in anything…
Point to Babbel.
Customization
RS does offer a vastly wider array of tools to allow you to customize your courses and focus. Furthermore, as it ads the potential for real tutoring, you are capable of working together with your teachers to focus on the things that matter. I suppose this must be part of the ridiculous price you pay. However, you can find cheaper language tutors on iTalki or language tandems for free.
Babbel still follows a very rigid series and doesn’t come with a lot of analytical tools for assessing progress or strengths and weaknesses.
The RS classroom module, despite its price tag, actually lets teachers pre-tailor courses for individual students based on their specific needs. It’s pretty powerful stuff and even lets you draw up official reports, which is great for language schools or teachers looking to dig into the analytics of their learners.
Point to Rosetta!
Conclusion
You can probably see that I’m not really a huge proponent of either of these products, and when asked which is better I would typically go on a rant about the dozens or even hundreds of other resources that are better.
Still, based on my experiences with both of these products I can tell you that it’s a pretty close competition, but that ultimately my vote goes to Babbel!
The biggest thing for me is the cost effectiveness. The overall quality of the two programs is more or less the same, but Babbel’s comes at a fraction of the price, and despite its weaknesses, that makes a big difference to the solo-learner.
You can find subscriptions to Babbel here:
One important point I want to make before you go, though, is that while I have laid out the pros and cons, these remain my opinions. If you have used Rosetta or Babbel and had successes with them, by all means don’t stop doing what you’re doing! Naturally everyone’s experience will differ and what doesn’t work for me may work for you.
What’s your opinion? What has your experience been with these two products? Leave a comment!
Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.
