European Alternatives to Duolingo

Babbel is widely considered the best European alternative to Duolingo. Based in Germany, it offers conversation-first courses written by linguists. Other strong options include Busuu and Lingoda.

Yes. Every provider on this page is established in the EU, the UK or Switzerland, which means GDPR (or its UK and Swiss equivalents) applies to them directly rather than through standard contractual clauses. In practice that gives you an EU-law data processing agreement, EU data residency and a supervisory authority you can actually complain to.

Duolingo is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so the data it processes falls under US jurisdiction and can be reached through instruments such as the CLOUD Act regardless of which region you select. A European provider keeps processing under EU law, removes the transfer impact assessment from your compliance workload, and keeps the money inside the European technology economy.

This page compares 7 of them, chosen for European establishment, GDPR compliance and genuine feature parity rather than for being merely available in Europe. See our full language learning category for the wider list.