Notable bells and whistles:
• The online/app version includes a number of other add-ons, such as flashcards.
• My familiarity with Pimsleur is mainly through CD-based offerings of yesteryear, but I assume that you still learn most of the way through listening and repeating.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• All lessons are about 30 minutes long, which demands certain time and location management from you to be able to study (unless you are completely not caring about disturbing those around you).

Notable bells and whistles:
• The interface uses cartoon pictorials for visualization, which has a certain cuteness factor.
• There are virtual rewards that help further gamify the experience.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Right from the very beginning, you come across words and phrases that are either of little use or are fairly nonsensical (“the cat boiled an egg”) – while they may still help you to retain the words and learn the structure of the language, I do not find the approach too productive.

Notable bells and whistles:
• “Learn with Locals” is the killer feature – short clips of native speakers saying the phrase in question mixed in with other activities.
• A recent addition to the app, called “Immersion”, offers daily one-to-two minute subtitled videos on a variety of lighthearted topics and functions a bit like podcast-based learning.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Speaking skill becomes an afterthought in this approach; you are left entirely at your discretion in terms of saying things out loud or not.
• Although you practice three other competencies interchangeably, it is still overall no more than a vocabulary builder.
• I have a personal dislike of unscramble-style exercise items, which are many in number.

Notable bells and whistles:
• For an extra fee, you can obtain actual conversational practice via individual tutoring.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• I am not convinced that this approach works for adults, since visual recognition quickly starts leading you in answering questions without actually mastering the language concepts.
• You can misinterpret clues regarding the language grammar structure, which may cause you some grief in the future.
• Writing exercises block you from progressing if you typed a single wrong character.

Notable bells and whistles:
• You can import your own content to study, including the sound portion (for instance, a text of a song and the accompanying mp3 file; or a text of a book along with its audiobook version).
• The platform works with videos as well, as long as you possess the script.
• The text-to-speech pronunciation engine is available even if you do not have the full audio accompanying the text; it is also used for all reviews.
• There are options to integrate your studies with other tools, such as flashcard deck building, etc.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• For languages with non-phonemic orthography, the text-to-speech engine is maddeningly inconsistent and even borderline detrimental to studies.
• Translation comes primarily via integration with Google Translator, which trips up on more complicated structures and turns of phrase; you often have to make use of alternative translating tools, which require extra clicks.
• There is no option to leave individual words in the “unknown” state – by default, every word that you encounter and don’t want to study becomes “known”, or you can change that default to leave every single word “unknown” unless it goes into your study deck; both of these options have drawbacks over long study periods of time.
• Speaking the language is a significant afterthought – it is entirely up to you to work some speaking into your studies.
• Spaced-repetition algorithm is hard to discern when you daily add more new words to your study list than you can review in a vocab review session; and in any case, the review is not forced on you.

Notable bells and whistles:
• There are different levels and studying paths that you can choose in each language; literally thousands of hours of lessons to choose from.
• There are also additional tools that you can use to help you practice, such as building flashcard decks.
• 1-on-1 language instruction can be obtained if you pay for the most expensive level of subscription.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• In reality, you are mainly practicing a single language competency, aided by building your vocabulary through flashcards if you take advantage of that add-on.
• Reading is involved inasmuch as looking at the lesson transcript when you listen to the audio portion.
• Speaking practice is almost completely up to you to come up with on your own, although many podcasts leave space for you to repeat after the native speaker.
• On a separate note, the English-language banter and standard script connectors used by the hosts, especially in the lower-level series, is quite excessive; since this method of study necessitates going over the same material several times, listening to those conversation fillers feels counterproductive (it does get better at higher levels of competency, though).

Notable bells and whistles:
• The UI is pretty snazzy.
• The app has a bot dialogue engine that imitates conversations you might have on given topics and provides limited speaking practice for the learner.
• You can also do lessons in a hands-free manner, also facilitated by a bot.
• Mondly also offers a VR application to study, which I have not tried.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• I could not discern any spaced repetition in the approach.
• I find the voice-recognition component of the bot engine rather lacking accuracy (going both ways – sometimes mispronounced words are accepted as correct, while on occasion no matter how much you try the system will hear a different set of words).
• Highly unvaried nature of the voice prompts by the bot in the hands-free mode leaves a lot to be desired.
• Finally, it may sound like nitpicking, but it felt to me that the snazziness of the UI was a marketing goal in itself when building the app.

Notable bells and whistles:
• The platform is focused solely on connecting learners with tutors and handling the transactional aspect of the connection.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• When the tutor is not working from a set script that they can share with you after the session, your only tool for reviewing what you discussed on your own is the Skype chat archive, which will require quite a lot of extra work in order to get words and phrases into your preferred flashcards system.
• It goes without saying that each tutor has their own approach to instruction, which is good from the variety point of view but may not be as great if you have a specific goal in mind.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Verbling provides its own ecosystem, complete with the video connection between you and your teacher, your chat archives, and built-in flashcard learning tools. It adds a level of sophistication and convenience to the process.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• You pay extra for that layer of sophistication of the ecosystem.
• I found the tutors on Verbling more rigid in their approach than people on iTalki.
• There are definitely fewer options here than on iTalki.

Notable bells and whistles:
• This is not exactly a tool but rather a community of people who are keen to reciprocally help each other with practicing their target language skills.
• There are a couple of learning implements (such as the ability to translate text or to correct written sentences of your study partner), but the main idea is to connect one-on-one; conversations seem to migrate to WhatsApp or Skype once you establish reasonable rapport.

Notable bells and whistles:
• The built-in library of the words and phrases is huge.
• When you first come upon a new flashcard, there are several different angles you can work with it to memorize, including recording yourself saying the words.
• The dialogue library (in effect, the podcasts) is not too large and aimed at users beyond the beginner level (which appeals to me but may not be useful to people just starting out); you can add individual phrases from the dialogues to your flashcard reviews.
• There is also an available extension that allows you to add words and phrases to your study deck when you find something useful elsewhere on the internet.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Navigation around the app and user features leave a lot to be desired – even after having used the app for a while, I am unsure about best ways to achieve some of the simplest things (such as taking a look at what exactly is in my study deck).
• Illustrating dialogues with sentence-based visuals is seriously counter-productive, in my opinion.
• I am also not a fan of the bare-bones hands-off mode or of the self-scrolling dialogue transcripts.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Phrases are learned by deconstructing them, and the auto-play mode turns the process into call-and-respond – these two features together come quite close to my favorite way of learning a language as epitomized by Pimsleur.
• There are frequent “culture tips” to help you get hang of the language.
• You can record your own pronunciation of the word/phrase and then adjust your recording so that it can be replayed simultaneously with the native pronunciation for comparison.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Auto-play leaves too long pauses for you to respond, in my opinion, which stretches out the lesson unnecessarily.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Initial lessons contain short clips that run through pronunciation and spelling specifics.
• Some of the practice questions focus on specific sounds of the language and others attempt to train your ear to distinguish between similar sounds and words; yet others focus on spelling or in the classic fashion on translating (verified by the visual association).
• The home page of the app shows you every day what it expects you to do, as well as suggesting additional activities.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Unlike other vocabulary builders, this one is focused on individual words – I have not seen a single phrase beyond the fact that “Grammar” flashcard builder uses example sentences to help you memorize words in context; the FAQs suggest that the full subscription opens up an area where sentences might be used.
• You do not choose which words are suggested for your deck – and there is no option to decline a suggestion; although the words may be useful in terms of practicing specific sounds, quite a few of them are not the words that an average person would think of as studying first (this goes in complete contradiction to the slide show on the home page of the app that suggests you will be studying the most frequently used words).
• The “training ear” flashcards use even more obscure examples, including distinct gibberish, which may be useful for the purpose in a scientific sense, but feels like a waste of time to go over.
• And in the category of my personal idiosyncrasies, the mobile app is sized only for a phone screen; I prefer to use a tablet – this is the only app that I used that has such limitation.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Recordings of you saying the required words and phrases are analyzed for “closeness” to the native speaker’s pronunciation.
• You can also perform a specific type of activity or game outside of the constraints of a given lesson, by selecting which of your learned vocabulary specifically to practice in a given manner.
• Every 3 lessons are combined into a “unit” – at the end of it, there is an assessment, utilizing all types of activities.
• The UI is sophisticated and easy to use; the first use of any type of activity is accompanied by step-by-step instructions.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• No spaced repetition is involved; each lesson deals solely with the vocabulary defined within it; practicing what you learned in past lessons is entirely at your discretion.

Notable bells and whistles:
• You start by taking a placement test, which may move you up the learning path somewhat.
• Typing is tolerant of diacritics omission.
• Some of the exercises take a form of short dialogues, in which you are still filling in just a word or two in cloze fashion.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• I am not fond of linking images to phrases – a picture of a lovely young girl against a “How old are you?” phrase is at best a very unconvincing association.
• The interface is pretty clean and simple to use, but there is an extra click on the “Done” button in many instances; a lot of other apps automatically accept the correct unscramble answer when it is constructed.

Notable bells and whistles:
• You are offered a new “Ready for Review” flashcards set every day at the top of your contents list.
• Each word or phrase is offered in two or sometimes three versions of use for context; additionally, you can look up a specific word across all of the available videos to see its different uses.
• Diacritics options are offered as you type.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Speaking competency is an afterthought in this approach; you are left entirely at your discretion in terms of saying things out loud or not.
• While the key words from each video are individually offered for study, every spoken line is bluntly considered as a unit in itself; that means that you have to reproduce the entire exact line – which may include proper names, conversational connectors, or sometimes have a grammatically incorrect word order – while doing the exercises. I found myself marking many sentences with “I already know it” as a way to remove them from practice rotation specifically because I did not care to study them as a unit.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Each video is also accompanied by “games”, which are essentially additional exercises, ranging from cloze activities to transcribing the entire captions from hearing them.
• Diacritics options are offered on screen for all typing questions.
• You can build flashcard review decks by adding any word you encounter.
• There is also a separate “lessons” area, with each item focusing on a narrow grammar or usage concept, illustrating that with multiple examples from video clips.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Speaking competency is an afterthought in this approach; you are left entirely at your discretion in terms of saying things out loud or not.
• Typing is intolerant of diacritics mistakes, so you are focusing on precise spelling a lot.
• There is no attempt to force you to review what you learned before.

Notable bells and whistles:
• You start using Glossika by taking a multiple-choice placement test which helps calibrate your studies.
• There is a function to record your own pronunciation.
• There is also a hands-free mode that consists entirely of listening (although you can – and should – repeat after the native speaker).
• The dashboard keeps the list of all the sentences you learned and alerts you when it’s time to review past sentences according to the spaced-repetition algorithm.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Having to type and retype the same sentence is not what I consider an engaging mode of study, especially when a single typo makes your answer invalid – in effect you are focusing on spelling as the most important language skill.
• The voice recording functionality is seemingly an afterthought – you can listen to your recordings in your dashboard, but not when you actually record them upon hearing the native speaker.
• Many of the suggested sentences contain proper names that are irrelevant to your language study, which started to annoy me very quickly (I do not need to learn the phrase “The Kremlin is in Moscow” when I study French); you can mark sentences as “easy” and thus take them off your list, but that’s a band-aid.

Notable bells and whistles:
• The interesting feature is that the system “analyzes” your knowledge and can automatically bump you up to a higher level if it recognizes that you are not a beginner.
• Other additional features include: multiple-choice “challenges”; selecting thematic focus or two to your studies to emphasize phrases in that topic; and most intriguingly, an ability to import a text or a list of words/phrases and thus create your own focus of studies.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• This approach emphasizes reading and vocabulary at the expense of all other competencies (although you technically are also practicing writing, with the system being forgiving of incorrect diacritics use).

Notable bells and whistles:
• You start by taking a placement test, which may move you up the learning path considerably.
• The differentiating feature is the community of native speakers who can participate in your learning by correcting some of your exercises, or by directly connecting with you to communicate in your target language; you are expected to reciprocate in your own native language.
• The paid version also gives you access to your personal “study plan” to help you motivate yourself and check your progress.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• The interface is not bad, per se, but I found quite a number of things to be not intuitive and requiring too much interaction with the app.
• Typing is unforgiving for diacritics.
• I am not fond of the mix of exercise activities, especially when it comes to true/false questions.
• There are also some exercises that explicitly involve “the community”, such as recording voice answers to questions, so if you are not interested to have your work reviewed by strangers, you will be regularly canceling out of that.

Notable bells and whistles:
• The practice part of the course are the drills for the pronunciation of every single sound, where you really are expected to mimic what you hear.
• Access to the lectures also gives access to online reading materials covering each of the elemental sounds.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• You are listening to long lectures and then are on your own in terms of doing the drills.
• The course is made in a fairly non-professional manner, and the audio-clips for drills are of varying quality as well.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Plenty of tips and grammar and usage notes are provided along the way.
• The full course has 100 lessons in the app version and 113 lessons in the book+audio version; it also has defined “weekly review” lessons once every 7 modules.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Since there is no explicit repetition involved, figuring out how to commit new words and phrases to memory is left entirely up to you on your own.
• The exercises feel pretty superficial (based on a tiny sample of one free lesson review).
• The app design leaves a bit to be desired, although getting used to its quirks does not take long.

Notable bells and whistles:
• There are occasional elements of conversation and infrequent “a-ha”-type grammar bits, but most of it is pure repetition, with some variation in intonation.
• Accompanying printed materials are available, and if you use the online app, there is a live transcription of each lesson.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Repeating after the native speaker is clearly expected, but is left completely to you to fill in the short pauses in the audio.
• Some of the background music is not smooth enough, in my opinion.
• Overall efficacy of the method is hard to ascertain from sample clips, but the short duration of each clip raises suspicions over how much material is covered in total (each level has only a dozen lessons by my calculations based on the total audio time provided in some descriptions).

Notable bells and whistles:
• “The Dojo” creates a dedicated area for you to practice words and phrases that you want to focus on mastering.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• Timed practice, especially with such a short allowance, forces you to rush – and it is certainly a stretch that you can get any level of mastery of anything in just five minutes a day.
• Additionally, some types of activities are simply too much into the gamified aspect at the expense of actual learning.
• Pictograms are occasionally confusing in terms of what they reflect with respect to the linked phrase.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Unlike Lingvist, it is decidedly low on sophistication.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• The interface is very retro and not very clean.
• The vocalization of the phrases is low-end synthesized.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Nice and easy-to-use interface.
• Everything is voiced by a male and a female speaker – sometimes individually and sometimes consecutively.
• You can record yourself pronouncing the same terms for comparison; some games require you to do so.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• The pictures are not always the clearest in meaning.
• Since the same word/phrase is linked to a single picture in all instances (and across languages), visual recognition quickly takes the lead when playing games.
• The positive reinforcement in the form of “Yes” when you answer each game question correctly is actually one of the biggest sources of annoyance.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Everything is voiced consecutively by a male and a female speaker – slower by the male and at normal speed by the female.
• You can also record yourself pronouncing the same terms for comparison.
• There are a couple of additional not really necessary features, such as in-app linkages to Google Translate and Google Maps.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• The UI is fairly primitive and requires a bit too much interaction to move along.
• The double vocalization gets a bit annoying after a while.

Notable bells and whistles:
• Tests and flashcards are available as extra features.

Pet peeves and drawbacks:
• I found the games impossible to enjoy: the tasks and instructions are often unclear and the screen is incredibly cluttered, and beginner-level questions are sometimes mixed in with tasks that require fairly advanced knowledge of the language.
• The UI, in general, is a bad intersection of primitive and confusing.