Language Reactor alternatives: 7 options, by what you need

Language Reactor is the tool most people start with for learning from Netflix and YouTube, and for a reason: dual subtitles and a click-to-look-up dictionary, free, in dozens of languages. When it works, there's little to complain about.

The searches for an alternative spike for two different reasons, and they need different answers: it stopped working, or it never did the thing you wanted.

Is Language Reactor still working?

Yes. It's alive, still updated, and still supported. It's also run by a very small team, and 2026 has been a rough year for uptime.

On the official forum, a "stuck on Loading…" thread ran from May to July with 85 posts and over 4,000 views, a "gibberish subtitles" report was still collecting "me too" replies in September, and a server-error outage during an update rollout lasted the better part of a day on September 8. The team replies to all of these, and fixes land — the Pro user who reported "completely broken" on August 25 had subtitles back within a day.

So if you're here because it broke tonight: it will very likely come back. Clear the extension's cache, reload the page, check the forum for an active thread, and give it a day.

If you're here because it broke for the third time this quarter, or because you need something it doesn't do, keep reading.

For reference, the current pricing since August 2026: the core is free, and Pro is $5.95 a month, $13.95 for three months, or $39.95 a year. Pro adds machine translation of the subtitle track, word and phrase export to Anki, and the Lexa AI dictionary.

Is Language Reactor Pro worth it?

Only if you'll use one of the three things it adds. The Anki export is the real one: if you already run Anki every day, Pro at $39.95 a year is the cheapest way to get sentences from Netflix into your deck. The machine-translated subtitle track earns its keep when a show has no subtitles in your language. The AI dictionary is nice, not necessary.

If you don't run Anki, Pro doesn't change the thing most people are unhappy about: the words you click still don't come back. The free tier already gives you dual subtitles and the dictionary, which is most of the value. Pay for the export, or don't pay.

You want free and open source

asbplayer is the answer Reddit gives, and it's a good one. Free, open source, Chrome and Firefox. It loads text-selectable subtitles onto almost any video page, streaming sites included, and its real strength is sentence mining: one keypress makes an Anki card with the sentence, audio and a screenshot. The cost is that you'll often supply your own subtitle files, and the interface assumes you already know what Anki is.

Pick it if you're comfortable with a bit of setup and Anki is already part of your life.

You need Firefox, Safari or mobile

Language Reactor is a Chromium extension. If your browser isn't Chrome, Edge or Brave, it doesn't matter how well it works.

asbplayer again for Firefox, including Firefox on Android.

Lingopie for phones and tablets: it has its own apps on iOS and Android because it has its own catalogue of shows rather than sitting on top of Netflix. About $7 to $14 a month depending on how you bill it, with a 7-day trial. How it compares with a reading tool like LingQ.

Pick these if the browser or the device was the blocker, not the features.

You want the same thing with more polish

Trancy is the closest like-for-like: dual subtitles on YouTube and Netflix, a popup dictionary, plus AI sentence explanations. It has a free tier, and Premium starts at roughly $3.49 a month. It's the one people move to when they want Language Reactor to just be a bit smoother, and it has been reliable while LR was having its outages.

Migaku is the power-user version at about $10 a month: dual subtitles on more services (Disney+, Viki and others), deep parsing for Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and a built-in review system so saved words don't die in a list. How it compares head-to-head.

Pick these if you liked what Language Reactor does and want it done more reliably or more deeply.

You want the words to actually stick

This is the gap free Language Reactor never filled. You click a word, you understand the line, and tomorrow it's gone. Saved words go to a list, and unless you export to Anki and run Anki, the list is where they stay.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is built around that gap. It's a free Chrome extension: open a YouTube video or any article on the web and it becomes a clean reading view. Tap a word for the meaning, and it's already saved with the sentence it came from. Reviews run on FSRS, the current generation of spaced repetition, with no card templates and no export step. A short quiz after reading keeps the next text at your level. No account needed, 8 languages (EN, ES, FR, DE, IT, PT, JA, KO).

What you give up: Netflix. Mossglen reads the web and YouTube, not streaming apps. If shows are most of your input, pair it with one of the tools above rather than replacing them.

Pick this if you're done clicking words that don't come back.

You read more than you watch

Language Reactor has a text mode, but it's a side feature. If your real input is news, blogs and forum threads, a reading tool will serve you better than a subtitle tool with reading bolted on: Mossglen for the open web, Readlang for a cheap classic web reader, LingQ if you want a big library of lessons with audio. Language Reactor vs LingQ covers that fork directly.

The short version

What you need	Go to	Cost
It's just down today	Wait a day, check the forum	—
Free, open source, Anki	asbplayer	Free
Firefox	asbplayer	Free
Phone or tablet	Lingopie	About $7–14/mo
Same thing, smoother	Trancy	Free tier, from ~$3.49/mo
Netflix plus built-in reviews	Migaku	About $10/mo
YouTube and articles, words that stick	Mossglen	Free
Reading first	Mossglen / Readlang / LingQ	Free / cheap / sub

One honest line: if Language Reactor's free tier does what you need and it's working today, there's no prize for switching. Leave because something is missing, not because a competitor's blog told you the tool is dead. It isn't.

For the wider method that makes any of these tools worth using, start with how learning a language by reading works. Paying for a video subscription on top of this one? What a FluentU subscription actually buys breaks the same three layers down by price.