You have booked lessons on italki, found a tutor you liked, and felt your speaking improve in real time. But between lessons, progress can get uneven. What you work on depends on which tutor you booked and what they decided to cover that day, and if your tutor is busy or you are traveling, your practice stops until you can book again.

That is not a flaw so much as a trade-off. italki is a marketplace for human conversation. Dioma is a curriculum. The real question is not which one is better. It is whether what is currently missing from your practice is a real person to talk to, or a structure you can work through on your own time.

What italki is built to do

italki connects learners with individual tutors for live, one-on-one video lessons, and it does that at real scale: the platform states it has connected more than 10 million learners with more than 30,000 teachers across 150-plus languages. There is no fixed curriculum. What a lesson covers, and how structured it is, comes down entirely to the tutor you choose.

italki splits tutors into two types. Professional Teachers have formal training or credentials and can offer structured lesson plans and prepared materials; their lessons typically run $10 to $50+. Community Tutors are native or fluent speakers without a teaching credential, focused mainly on conversation practice, typically $4 to $40+ a lesson. There is no subscription: you buy credits and pay per lesson, and most learners find lessons costing $4 to $25 depending on the teacher and language. An optional add-on, italki Plus, costs $5.99 a month (or $4.99 a month billed annually) and layers on AI-generated lesson summaries and vocabulary lists, but it does not change what you pay for lessons themselves.

This is a strong model for what it is built for: live conversation with a real person, on a schedule you choose, with a tutor you pick based on your goals. italki is upfront that it does not provide the curriculum itself. Structure, pacing, and progression are set by whichever tutor you book, which means quality and consistency vary by teacher, and you have to do the work of communicating your goals and tracking your own progress across sessions. For a learner who wants speaking confidence and human correction in the moment, that is a fair trade. For a learner who wants a defined path through grammar and skills at a specific level, it leaves you to build that structure yourself.

What Dioma is built to do

Dioma is built to be the structure. It is a self-paced subscription platform for intermediate and advanced learners (roughly A2 to C1) across Spanish, French, and Hebrew, with a curriculum of 751 topics written by professional language educators and mapped to CEFR sub-levels. There are no live sessions. You are placed at your level in the first hour of practice, and the system draws each lesson from that curriculum based on where you are and what you keep missing. Every exercise ends with corrective feedback on your own speaking and writing, with the rule attached, not just the right answer.

That means the two things italki does not centrally provide, a fixed progression and a feedback loop you do not have to schedule, are the two things Dioma is built around. It also means the thing italki is best at, a live human conversation partner who can read a room and respond to anything you say, is not something Dioma offers. Dioma’s feedback is automated, not human, and its language coverage is currently three languages against italki’s 150-plus. If what you are missing is a real person to talk to, italki (or a tutor on any similar marketplace) is the more direct fix.

How to tell which one fits you

The deciding question is not which platform is more effective in the abstract. It is what is actually missing from your current practice.

Add italki if: you want to speak with a real person, you value being able to pick a tutor who matches your goals and personality, or you need a specialist for exam prep or business language. Its pay-as-you-go model also means you are never locked into a monthly cost you are not using.

Add Dioma if: you want a defined path through grammar and skills at your level, without needing to find, brief, and coordinate a tutor first, and you want feedback you can get the moment you finish an exercise rather than at your next booked lesson.

Use both, in combination, if you are like a lot of serious learners: Dioma for the structured, on-demand practice between lessons, and italki for the live conversation and human correction that only a real tutor can give. They are not really competing, so pairing them is not redundant the way pairing two similar apps would be.

“I’ve done over 300 language lessons on italki, and it gives you a real person to talk to, on their schedule. Dioma gives you a curriculum and feedback you can use any time, on yours. Most serious learners end up wanting both. Geoff Bloom, founder of Dioma”

Where Dioma fits alongside a tutor

No single tool replaces the value of talking to another person, and Dioma does not claim to. A tutor on italki can catch things an automated system cannot: tone, register, the improvised back-and-forth of a real conversation. What a tutor cannot always give you is a fixed curriculum and same-day feedback on writing you did at midnight. Think of it less like choosing a side and more like staffing two different roles: italki for live practice with a person, Dioma for the structured reps in between.

Frequently asked questions