Lingopie for the evening, Readly for the commute

Side by side

Checked against lingopie.com and the Lingopie App Store listing on 24 August 2026. Prices in USD and vary by region and promotion.

Video and text are not interchangeable

Video trains the ear: real speed, real accents, the words people actually use when they are annoyed. Subtitles make it survivable, and tapping one for a translation is a good habit. What video does badly is depth — the dialogue moves on whether or not you understood, and it is easy to finish an episode having learned the plot instead of the language.

Text waits for you. You reread the sentence, you notice the construction, you tap the two words you actually needed. That is why most people eventually do both — and why comparing them on features alone misses the point.

What a year costs, and why

Lingopie licenses television, and that is expensive: the App Store shows $13.99 a month and $83.99 for a year, with several cheaper tiers listed alongside, so what you are offered depends on region and promotion. For a catalogue of licensed shows in 15 languages, that is a defensible price.

Readly costs $6.99 a month or $47.99 a year, and the honest reason is that books in the library are largely works whose copyright has expired, plus whatever EPUB files you bring yourself. Cheaper, and narrower — you are paying for a reader, not for television.

The catalogue is the ceiling

Everything Lingopie teaches you comes from Lingopie: you cannot add the series you are already watching elsewhere, and you cannot bring a book at all. Their library is good and it is bounded.

In Readly the EPUB you already own opens in the same reader as the built-in library, with the same tap-to-translate behaviour, and so does an article you paste a link to. If the thing you want to read is specific, that difference is the whole decision.

What Lingopie does better

Where Lingopie clearly wins:

• Listening. Real speech at real speed, which no reading app can substitute for.
• The catalogue. Licensed shows and films in 15 languages, with dual subtitles built for learners.
• Every screen. Phones, tablets, computers and TV apps including Fire TV, Roku and Google TV. Readly is iOS only.
• Android. Half of the world's phones, and Readly is not on them yet.
• Games and flashcards. Review material generated automatically from the words you clicked while watching.

Reading and watching train different muscles, so the realistic answer for many people is one of each rather than a winner.

If you switch

Nothing transfers: the words you saved from subtitles stay in Lingopie, and Readly starts collecting from the first word you tap. If you are cancelling to save money, the arithmetic is roughly $84 a year against $48 — real, but not life-changing, so switch because you would rather read, not because of the difference.

Questions people ask