Nearly every migrant/expat forum in the Netherlands has the same thread, updated every few months: which app actually gets you to B1? The honest answer is that most of them get you to A2 and then quietly stop being useful, right around the point where the inburgeringsexamen actually starts to matter. This list ranks ten apps and platforms, from genuinely good to actively avoid, judged on four things: how much Dutch you learn per euro, whether the content maps to real exam requirements, what the reviews say once the marketing copy is stripped away, and whether the pricing page tells the truth.
We’ve included two systems specifically. Duolingo, because it’s the default first download for almost everyone starting Dutch from zero. And Dutched.app, heavy on Facebook marketing rotation and because its own checkout page raises the exact question worth asking of any paid Dutch product: what does the listed price actually include, and what gets sold to you afterward as an add-on?
The ranking at a glance
| Rank | App/platform | Best for | Starting cost | One-line verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Babbel | Structured general Dutch | ~€10–18/month, discounts common | The most complete course-style app for adults |
| 2 | Clozemaster | Vocabulary in context | Free tier; Pro ~$8/mo or $60/yr | Best way to stop translating word by word |
| 3 | Busuu | Speaking practice, native correction | Free tier; Premium ~$10–14/mo | Built much like Duolingo but real people correct your writing and speech |
| 4 | Inburgering Coach | Exam-specific writing feedback | €14.99/month, 7-day trial | The only app on this list built around the actual exam |
| 5 | Duolingo | Absolute beginners, free habit-building | Free; Super from ~€7–13/mo | Fine for week one, stalls out fast and it’s more about your streak than learning |
| 6 | Drops | Quick vocabulary top-ups | Free 5 min/day; Premium from ~$3–13/mo | A supplement, never a course |
| 7 | Memrise | Casual vocabulary via video | Free tier; Premium ~$9–25/mo | Lost its best feature when it dropped serious spaced repetition |
| 8 | Mondly | Nobody, honestly | “Free trial” that often isn’t free | Read the cancellation reviews before entering a card number |
| 9 | Dutched.app | People who want PDFs, not an app | €39.90 “sale” price (was €79.90) | A downloadable course marketed with app-store language but then you have to pay for books, which isn’t mentioned in sign-up |
| 10 | Generic “Learn Dutch” clone apps | Nobody | Free with in-app purchases | Mass-produced word lists dressed up as courses |
1. Babbel — the most complete paid option
Babbel earns the top spot because it does what most gamified apps skip: it teaches Dutch word order and sentence construction instead of just vocabulary. Reviewers who moved to the Netherlands and found they could recognize Dutch but not produce it describe Babbel as the app that closed that specific gap, built around everyday situations like ordering food or making plans rather than abstract drills.
Pros: genuine grammar explanations aimed at adults, not children; speech-recognition practice; dialogues based on real situations rather than random phrasebook lines; a lifetime-access option shows up during sales.
Cons: no meaningful free tier, only a single trial lesson per language; the sticker price is misleading. Full retail runs close to $18/month, but realistic pricing after the discounts Babbel runs constantly lands closer to $8–15.
Cost: roughly €8–18/month depending on plan length and whatever promotion happens to be running that week. A lifetime-access bundle for all languages has been sold around $150–300 during sales.
Honest read: the best general-purpose Dutch app that isn’t free, and worth it if structured grammar is what’s actually missing from a gamified-app routine.
2. Clozemaster — the vocabulary accelerator
Clozemaster works on cloze deletion: real Dutch sentences with one word blanked out, forcing active recall instead of passive flashcard flipping. The basic version, with access to thousands of sentences, is free; a Pro subscription adding analytics and offline mode costs $8/month or $60/year. It isn’t a beginner’s first app — it assumes some grammar is already in place — but for anyone stuck translating in their head sentence by sentence, it’s the fastest fix available.
Pros: genuinely free core version; sentence-level context beats isolated word lists; works well as a daily add-on to a “real” course.
Cons: thin on grammar explanation; the leaderboard/competitive layer isn’t for everyone; not a standalone path to B1.
Cost: free tier is fully usable; Pro is $8/month or $60/year.
Honest read: not the app to start with, but the one worth adding once basic sentence structure is in place.
3. Busuu — the speaking-practice specialist
Busuu’s distinguishing feature is that it pushes users to record spoken answers early, which other users — often native Dutch speakers — then correct. That feels riskier than passive multiple-choice exercises but is still low-stakes enough to make mistakes in, and it’s a community-correction model that’s unusual among Dutch apps and genuinely useful, since most competitors never ask a learner to actually produce spoken Dutch.
Pros: real human correction, not just an algorithm; McGraw-Hill certification available for some content; reasonably priced against Babbel.
Cons: correction quality depends entirely on who’s online; waits for feedback can run days for less common language pairs; free tier is thin, with ads before lessons.
Cost: roughly $10–14/month, with annual plans bringing it closer to $70/year.
Honest read: the app to pick specifically for speaking confidence, which is the skill self-study apps handle worst as a category.
4. Inburgering Coach — built around the actual exam
Most apps on this list treat inburgering as an afterthought bolted onto a general course. Inburgering Coach was built by someone who sat the exam themselves, and it shows: it marks writing exercises line by line, explains what’s wrong, and lets the learner retry until the fix sticks. It starts with three free exercises, then moves to a €14.99/month subscription after a 7-day free trial, backed by a pass guarantee that refunds the fee if an official exam part is failed within six months.
Pros: the only app here with exam-format practice built specifically for DUO’s actual test structure, not generic Dutch content; a real money-back guarantee tied to a real exam result; strong App Store rating.
Cons: it produces practice feedback, not an official DUO score, so results should be treated as guidance rather than a guarantee of exam readiness; €14.99/month adds up over a multi-month study period; newer product with a shorter public track record than Babbel or Duolingo.
Cost: €14.99/month after a 7-day free trial.
Honest read: the strongest single-purpose exam-prep app currently available, and the one to pair with a broader vocabulary tool like Clozemaster or Drops.
5. Duolingo — free, familiar, and increasingly limited
Duolingo remains the default starting point for a reason: it’s free, it’s everywhere, and the streak mechanic genuinely gets people to open the app daily. But 2026’s “Energy” system — which replaced the old Hearts and can lock learners out of lessons after a run of mistakes — has drawn real frustration. Duolingo also doesn’t publish a single public price list, so pricing is inconsistent enough that different accounts, platforms, and countries report different numbers for what is nominally the same Super subscription.
Pros: free tier is a real, usable product, not just a demo; low barrier to starting; useful for building a daily habit and basic vocabulary.
Cons: grammar is taught implicitly through pattern repetition rather than explained; the Energy/Hearts system punishes mistakes in a way that frustrates serious learners; no meaningful exam-specific content; the DET certification it sells is for English, not Dutch, and is irrelevant to inburgering.
Cost: free; Super runs roughly €7–13/month depending on region and promotion; Family plans split the cost across up to six accounts.
Honest read: a fine on-ramp for the first few weeks, a poor primary tool for anyone with an actual B1 deadline. Some people have been using Duolingo for years and cannot produce a sentence in the language.
6. Drops — a vocabulary snack, not a meal
Drops teaches words through picture-matching games in short, timed sessions, and it’s honest about being a supplement rather than a course. Even its own free tier is generous by industry standards, with more than 1,700 words across 99 topics available to everyone before premium subscriptions kick in from $2.99/month. But it teaches no grammar and doesn’t touch writing, which matters directly for inburgering’s writing component.
Pros: genuinely fun, visually driven format; a real free tier that isn’t just a trial; low-commitment daily use.
Cons: no grammar instruction at all; five-minute session caps on the free tier feel restrictive; long-time users report the app hasn’t fixed known content-quality issues in years — one reviewer who returned to the app in 2026 found the same longstanding errors still present, and flagged that new AI-generated explanations had been added without any apparent native-speaker review.
Cost: free with daily limits; Premium from roughly $3–13/month depending on plan length and promotions, or a one-time lifetime option around $150–160.
Honest read: worth having installed alongside a real course, never as the only Dutch app on the phone.
7. Memrise — good bones, questionable direction
Memrise built its reputation on spaced repetition, the same principle Anki uses, but a 2022 pivot toward video-based lessons shifted the product away from that strength and toward something closer to Duolingo with native-speaker clips — a change that alienated a fair number of its long-time users. The video content itself is genuinely engaging; the loss of the old SRS-first approach is the real cost.
Pros: native-speaker video clips give a better sense of natural spoken Dutch than most audio-only apps; free tier includes real content, not just a teaser.
Cons: the pivot away from serious spaced repetition frustrated its original user base; pricing is inconsistent across sources, with monthly rates reported anywhere from roughly $9 to $25 depending on plan and region; grammar depth is thin compared to Babbel.
Cost: free tier available; Premium reported between roughly $9–25/month, with annual plans typically far cheaper per month than the monthly rate.
Honest read: decent as a supplementary listening tool, not a primary course, and not the app it used to be for spaced-repetition purists.
8. Mondly — cheap, and the reviews explain why
Mondly’s pricing looks attractive next to Babbel and Busuu, but its Trustpilot page is dominated by a specific, recurring complaint: a “free trial” that quietly starts billing, and a cancellation process users describe as deliberately hard to find. One reviewer warned that nothing on the app is genuinely free before charges begin, and another described being unable to find any way to cancel through the iPhone Subscriptions menu at all. A separate account is more striking still: a user who had switched off automatic renewal after a yearly plan was charged again a year later, and found the renewal setting had been switched back on without being asked.
Pros: AR/VR novelty features and a chatbot exist, if that’s a draw; broad language catalogue; genuinely cheap during its frequent sales.
Cons: the trial-and-billing pattern shows up repeatedly enough across independent reviews to be a pattern rather than a one-off; content doesn’t meaningfully deepen between beginner and advanced levels; customer support responsiveness gets criticized often.
Cost: monthly plans advertised from roughly $10–16, lifetime access has been discounted as low as $90 during sales — but read the trial terms carefully before entering payment details.
Honest read: the price looks like the best deal on this list right up until the billing and cancellation experience factors in. Skip it.
9. Dutched.app — an app in name, a PDF bundle in practice
This is the one worth unpacking carefully, because its own landing page is the clearest evidence of the problem. Dutched.app sells itself as “an app,” but what actually ships is a Shopify storefront selling a set of digital PDFs — a 12-week study program, a frequency dictionary, a phrasebook — plus a companion browser tool for quizzes. The core bundle is a one-time €39.90 payment (marked down from a permanent-looking €79.90 “sale” price with a countdown timer that resets), described as lifetime access with no subscription.
The direct answer to the “do you have to buy additional books” question: yes, and it isn’t obvious from the main page. Beyond the core €39.90 bundle, Dutched.app’s own storefront lists separate paid add-ons that aren’t included by default — a “100+ Inburgering Exam Exercises” pack at €15, a “60-Day Study Planner” at €7, a “Deep-Dive Pack” of eight cheat sheets at €7, and a “Complete Add-on Bundle” combining several extras at €19. None of that is disclosed until a shopper scrolls to the site’s product catalogue, well past the checkout button for the main course.
Pros: genuinely no recurring subscription for the core bundle; the frequency dictionary approach (most-used words first, with real example sentences) is a sound method; testimonials specifically mention inburgering prep going well alongside the material; works from any device since it’s PDF-based rather than a native app.
Cons: marketed with app-store language (“Access Now,” a shopping cart, countdown-timer urgency) for a product that is mostly static PDFs; the true cost of a fully equipped kit — core bundle plus exercise pack plus planner plus cheat sheets — runs closer to €60–70 once the add-ons are added, not the headline €39.90; the “50% off” framing with a resetting countdown timer is a standard urgency tactic rather than a real limited-time price; no independent third-party reviews outside its own testimonial section were found, which is unusual for a product with claimed volume of satisfied users; the FAQ’s claim that the program is “absolutely” sufficient to pass inburgering is a strong promise for a self-published PDF course to make about a government exam it doesn’t administer.
Cost: €39.90 for the core bundle (program, dictionary, phrasebook, practice tool); optional add-ons run an additional €7–19 each, with a combined add-on bundle at €19.
Honest read: not a scam — the core material looks reasonably built, and a one-time PDF purchase is a legitimate alternative to a subscription. But it is not really “an app” in the sense Duolingo or Babbel are, the pricing page undersells what a complete kit actually costs, and anyone drawn in by the countdown timer should know that urgency is cosmetic, not a real deadline.
10. Generic “Learn Dutch” clone apps — the ones to skip entirely
A cluster of near-identical apps occupies app store search results for “learn Dutch”: word-list apps built from the same white-label template, often by companies producing dozens of near-identical apps across different languages. One representative example has been downloaded over 30 million times across its whole language catalogue and functions purely as a vocabulary tool — it assumes users already understand basic Dutch grammar, and even a satisfied reviewer recommended pairing it with Duolingo or a grammar book for anything beyond word memorization. These apps aren’t malicious, but they’re built for volume, not depth. Several also carry the kind of vague, broad third-party data-sharing disclosure typical of ad-supported vocabulary apps, and reviewers of one popular title note that a recent version update introduced bugs the previous version didn’t have.
Pros: free, low-friction downloads; fine as a supplementary flashcard tool for absolute beginners; offline word lists are genuinely convenient for travel.
Cons: no real grammar instruction; interchangeable branding across dozens of near-identical apps from the same developer studios makes it hard to judge which version, if any, is actively maintained; broad data-sharing practices are common in this category; zero relevance to inburgering’s speaking, writing, or societal-knowledge components.
Cost: free with in-app purchases, typically for offline packs or ad removal.
Honest read: useful as a five-minute vocabulary filler on a commute, useless as anything resembling a study plan.
What this means for inburgering specifically
The inburgeringsexamen isn’t a language test in the way Duolingo or Babbel are built for — it’s a bundle of components covering reading, writing, listening, speaking, and knowledge of Dutch society (KNM), with the required level depending on which integration law applies to a given case. Under the older Wet inburgering 2013, most language exams sit at A2; under Wet inburgering 2021, which covers obligations starting 1 January 2022, candidates sit B1-level exams under the Staatsexamen NT2 Programme I instead. None of the general vocabulary apps on this list — Duolingo, Drops, Memrise, the clone apps — were built with that structure in mind, which is exactly why Inburgering Coach ranks as high as it does despite being the newest and narrowest product here: it’s the only one actually shaped by DUO’s exam format rather than adapted to it after the fact.
A realistic stack looks less like one app and more like a small toolkit: Babbel or Duolingo for daily grammar and vocabulary habit-building, Clozemaster once basic sentence structure is in place, and an exam-specific tool like Inburgering Coach in the final stretch before booking the actual test. Nothing on this list, including the ones ranked highest, replaces reading DUO’s own exam structure directly at inburgeren.nl, which is the one source that changes the requirements, not just the study material.
Sources
- Best apps to learn Dutch in 2026: Tested, compared, and ranked — DutchReview
- This app helps expats survive the Dutch inburgering exam — DutchReview
- Best Apps To Learn Dutch 2026: An Honest Guide for Serious Learners — Clozemaster Blog
- Best Inburgering Vocabulary Apps (2026) — prep2go.study
- Dutched.app — official site
- How Much Does Babbel Cost? — Test Prep Insight
- Busuu vs Babbel: A Detailed Comparison — Krioda
- Duolingo vs Babbel vs Rosetta Stone: Language Apps (2026) — Unstar
- How Much Is Super Duolingo in September 2026? — DealNews
- How Much Does Duolingo Cost in 2026? — languageappguide.com
- Drops: Learn Dutch — Google Play listing
- Drops, Extensive Review after 1 Year of Use — WaniKani Community
- Mondly Reviews — Trustpilot
- Shocking Honesty: Mondly Reviews 2026 — US-Reviews
- Learn Dutch (Beginners) App — App Store listing
- Learn Dutch — Google Play listing
- Inburgeren.nl — official Dutch civic integration information
