Comparison of the best business language training programs for companies [2025]

Are you looking to give your company a competitive edge by investing in language learning? Smart choice.

In this increasingly globalized economy, the right tool can unlock a wealth of opportunities for your employees. And the icing on the cake? Your business can profit from corporate language training and your team’s new linguistic skills as well.

So, if you’d like to explore the best online language learning platforms for organizations in 2025, then you’ve landed on the right page.

Ready to choose the right language learning program for your business? Let’s get started.

Why is language learning important for businesses?

As you’d expect, there are numerous benefits of language learning for employees and employers.

On an individual level, research shows that learning a new language changes your brain. And these transformations can enhance the cognitive abilities of your workforce.

Specifically, it strengthens a person’s working memory, reading skills, verbal fluency, decision-making abilities, attention span, confidence, multitasking, and creativity. Not to mention, it boosts overall well-being by warding off dementia.

These personal benefits of learning a second language not only profit employees but also the companies they work for.

To start, the cognitive rewards of language learning that are listed above will naturally elevate workers’ job performance.

It can also improve internal communication in your organization as global teams become more diverse. By breaking down language barriers between employees of different backgrounds, you can develop a more cohesive and productive workforce.

Similarly, if your team is able to communicate with customers and clients who speak another language, your business can more easily expand into new markets.

In addition, this linguistic inclusivity will improve the company’s brand reputation and build more customer loyalty.

Finally, you can improve employee engagement through language learning, which will consequently increase employee retention.

As you can see, corporate language training and improving your teams’ language skills have the potential to contribute to the long-term success of any business.

What are the best business language training programs for companies?

With so many language learning companies available, it can be difficult to find the best tool to teach your staff a foreign language. So we’ve decided to help you narrow down that search.

In the list below, we’ll compare language learning programs that currently lead the industry, examining both their strengths and weaknesses.

Here you can discover the right match for your organization and come one step closer to helping your employees thrive through corporate language training.

1. Preply Business

Preply Business is one of the top business language training companies in the world. Its corporate language training program is specifically designed to help employees achieve any linguistic goal they may have—no matter the professional context.

Preply can offer such a customized learner experience because its expert tutors teach users language skills through 1-on-1 online classes.

These private lessons are tailored to the individual needs, industry, skill level, objectives, and learning preferences of each student. Preply Business offers tuition in multiple languages however, corporate English training features are amongst the most popular for companies and language learners.

Preply’s platform also serves to boost student learning, and it’s available on the company’s website and mobile language learning app. Here, employers can assess their staff’s progress through proficiency tests and track each team member’s class attendance.

Alternatively, employees can use the platform to attend lessons, message their tutor, and access additional learning materials. For example, there are self-study or interactive exercises, and digital flashcards available for independent practice, amongst an abundance of other language learning techniques and tools.

As the cherry on top, scheduling tutoring sessions with Preply Business is a piece of cake, regardless of your staff’s limited availability. As all classes are held online, students can attend classes from anywhere: their office, the library, their home, a café, etc.

Moreover, Preply matches employees with an instructor who can meet with them at their preferred time—morning, noon, or night.

Able to work with small teams as well as large firms, Preply Business has arguably the best online language training for companies on the market today.

Languages offered: 50+ languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Dutch, etc.

2. italki Business

Featuring among the top language learning companies in the language learning industry, Italki is an online platform that connects learners with native instructors for private language classes via video chat. Users can take informal lessons with un-credentialed tutors or structured lessons with certified teachers.

The program also supplies a range of comprehensive resources for students to study on their own: assessments, podcasts, articles, discussion boards, and quizzes. Companies that sign up for an italki business account have three membership options: basic, standard, and premium.

The basic version supports a maximum of 20 learners and generates study progress and finance reports for clients. It equips businesses with an employee management tool, but only offers customer support by email. The standard version adds professional teacher recommendations, monthly email reports, study certificates, and an unlimited user capacity to the package.

However, only the most expensive premium version assigns teachers to individual students and provides a dedicated account manager.

Languages offered: 130+ languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Dutch, Ukrainian, etc.

3. Cambly for Organizations

Much like italki, Cambly uses virtual 1-on-1 lessons with native tutors to teach students another language. Unfortunately, the only language currently available on the Cambly platform is English.

Users can choose a teacher based on their industry and book lessons in advance with a chosen tutor. Or, learners with unpredictable schedules can connect with random instructors immediately. But beware: last minute lessons give teachers no time to prepare organized classes that can address students’ specific needs.

One drawback to the program is that Cambly doesn’t require their tutors to have any teaching experience or credentials. So Cambly business English lessons use a conversation-based methodology that is mostly based on informal discussions with the instructor about their area of expertise.

Nevertheless, the platform’s library does provide untrained teachers with two guided curricula to work with if they’re short on ideas: “Business English” and “Advanced Business English.”

Languages offered: English

4. Duolingo for Business

Duolingo is a mobile app that offers short, self-paced lessons to introduce users to another language. During these sessions, students engage in translation exercises, listening activities, vocabulary games, and pronunciation practice.

But sadly, this platform doesn’t provide tutor-led classes for a more personalized learning approach. Despite this shortcoming, Duolingo tracks users’ progress through quizzes and uses leaderboards to encourage competition among learners around the world.

Joining Duolingo for Business gives employers access to quarterly reports on their team’s sign-up rate, engagement levels, and chosen languages. It won’t give info on individual workers due to privacy concerns. Another solid feature is community-building: employees can follow and congratulate each other on their achievements.

But here’s one final point to consider: Duolingo can teach basic vocabulary and phrases, yet its isolated approach to language learning isn’t enough to reach professional fluency without tutor guidance.

Languages offered: 35+ languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Polish, Greek, English, etc.

5. Udemy Business

Udemy is an education platform that hosts thousands of online video courses covering a wide range of topics, including language learning. All videos are pre-recorded, which has its pros and cons. For starters, on-demand videos enable students to learn at their own pace, starting and stopping clips when needed.

In contrast, learning from a taped instructor doesn’t provide users with any personalized feedback or authentic interaction with the language—strategies which can quickly advance fluency.

In addition to video lessons, some Udemy language courses offer downloadable resources, articles, and certificates of completion. However, as classes are designed by different instructors, they all vary. For instance, one language course might supply additional materials and a certificate, whereas another only contains the videos.

Courses can also last anywhere from 2 to 50+ hours. Lastly, enrolling in Udemy Business grants users unlimited access to all content and provides employers with learner insights and analytics.

Languages offered: 50+ languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, etc.

6. Lingoda

Lingoda offers online language courses with native instructors. The classes are broken down into three main areas. The “learning and development” (L&D) category aims to improve a company’s business results through bi- and multilingualism.

The “nursing” category focuses on foreign language proficiency within the nursing profession. And the “global mobility” category prepares employees who are relocating to effectively communicate with colleagues, clients, and locals in their new city abroad.

For corporate classes, the program provides onboarding services, a proficiency level assessment, free supplementary learning materials, 24/7 scheduling availability, a set schedule, progress reports, and flexible group sizes (group classes).

On the downside, corporate classes are only delivered to groups, meaning no 1-on-1 lessons with tailor-made learning plans. The service also comes with a limited number of languages for employees to learn.

Languages offered: 4 languages, including English, French, Spanish, and German

7. Berlitz

Berlitz aims to provide working professionals with language courses that enable them to speak and write effectively in their current roles. Classes are led by live instructors, either online or face-to-face, yet in-person sessions are only available in select locations: Washington D.C., Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. These courses may be scheduled for individual workers or groups classes of employees.

Other interesting features of the Berlitz program include cultural training classes that help workers accept and embrace their multinational colleagues, as well as relocation services that prepare employees to live and work in another country. The company also touts scheduling flexibility and company-specific learning content.

Languages offered: 30+ languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Greek, Hindi, and Thai

8. Learnlight

Learnlight is a language learning program that focuses on developing employees’ foreign language proficiency in order to advance their professional and personal communication with colleagues and clients in the workplace. The business provides three instructional approaches to corporate language training: blended virtual learning, self-paced digital training, and face-to-face corporate programs.

The blended option involves working with personal tutors who guide students through a structured and linear online curriculum. The self-paced online option means workers independently complete digital courses and activities on the company’s platform.

The face-to-face option entails working through online exercises first and then participating in 1-on-1 in-person classes with Learnlight trainers. The organization claims to deliver these onsite lessons anywhere in the world.

Languages offered: 60+ languages, including English, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Czech, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Catalan, and Polish

9. Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is one of the most well-known online language programs and also gets credit for being one of the best Spanish learning programs based on its immersion-style approach.

Similar to Learnlight’s blended instruction, employees are given access to the company’s structured content, which includes speech recognition software, interactive exercises, audio clips, and business texts. Customers also have the option to participate in unlimited live tutoring sessions with Rosetta Stone instructors when they need clarification.

Additionally, the platform delivers detailed reports to employers about their team’s engagement with the training program and their linguistic progress based on various learning assessments.

The company asserts that these tools can smoothly integrate into another learning management system (LMS) so that supervisors can easily administer and oversee the language learning program.

Languages offered: 25 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Filipino, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Persian, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, and Dutch

10. Memrise

Memrise is an online learning tool available through its website and mobile app. It provides learning resources for 23 different languages. Its interface uses a point system, leaderboard, flashcards, and video clips of native speakers.

The platform uses mnemonics to improve learning retention with the visualization-association technique and offers offline video & audio lessons. The platform has a free limited access basic version and a paid yearly premium version. It is best for visual learners and vocabulary memorization, as well as group learning and a leaderboard feature to engage your team.

Pros include access to community-created courses for specific topics and a customizable experience. Cons are that repetition of training exercises can either bore or disengage employees, and community-created courses added on the website don’t show up in the mobile app.

11. FluentU

FluentU is a language learning platform that uses transcribed and gamified real-world videos. It turns movie trailers, music videos, news, and other media from 10 different languages into an interactive learning tool.

The platform offers video subtitles with translations and interactive practice activities, access to full transcripts of all videos, gamified quizzes after every video, with vocabulary progress tracking.

It is best for visual and auditory learners who want to listen to native speakers authentically interact and communicate. The pros include gamified learning features, a summarized list of vocabulary, and thousands of videos covering a wide range of topics.

The cons are the lack of course structure and SMART goal-setting and no transliteration for some language scripts like Japanese and Chinese.

With so many options available, deciding which language program best fits your team’s needs can be challenging.

If you need help on how to choose the best language program for your employees, our article on what to consider when choosing corporate language training provides expert tips and advice to help you make the right choice.

Ready to roll out your program? Check out the best practices for implementing a language-learning program at a global organization.

Final words

Companies that invest in business language training benefit from highly skilled and engaged employees. They also have more efficient international business operations due to improved communication among colleagues and clients, a better understanding of different cultures, and a stronger brand.

Consequently, corporate language training is a no-brainer for organizations seeking long-term success.

Now that you’ve seen the top language learning programs compared, it’s important to select a tool that addresses the diverse needs of your business and employees. Especially seek out a language learning platform that is adaptable and provides your staff with a personalized education.

In doing so, you can ensure your workforce has the linguistic knowledge and language skills required to compete in this ever-changing world.