Is Language Reactor Free? What the Free Plan Does, What Pro Costs, and the Free Alternatives
Mostly, yes: Language Reactor's bilingual subtitles, click-a-word dictionary and playback tools are free on YouTube, and free on Netflix with Netflix's own subtitles. Pro — US$5.95 a month, US$13.95 for three months or US$39.95 a year — is what lets you save words while you watch, highlights them everywhere and exports them to Anki. Here is the Free-vs-Pro line read off Language Reactor's own Pro page in October 2026, and the free alternatives sorted by what you actually need.
Yes, mostly: Language Reactor's bilingual subtitles, click-a-word dictionary and playback controls are free, with no time limit. What Pro (US$5.95 a month, or US$39.95 a year) adds is the keeping — saving words while you watch, seeing them highlighted everywhere, exporting them to Anki — plus speech recognition and machine translation on Netflix.
That's the answer. The rest of this page is the detail behind it, read straight off Language Reactor's own Pro page on 5 October 2026 rather than repeated from an older article — and, because the people asking "is it free" are usually deciding whether to pay, the free alternatives sorted by what you actually want from it.
Free vs Pro, side by side
Language Reactor's Pro page draws the line in four rows. Here they are, in its own terms (checked October 2026):
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Netflix subtitles | The subtitle tracks Netflix itself provides | Adds speech recognition for every audio track (subtitles for dubbed shows) and machine translation |
| Saving words and phrases | Only inside PhrasePump, its listening-drill mode | Everywhere in Language Reactor; saved words are highlighted throughout and can be exported to Anki |
| Lexa, the AI dictionary helper | A basic AI helper | A stronger model for harder questions |
| Aria, the chat partner | Chat in your study language | Aria remembers past conversations |
| Price | $0 | US$5.95 a month · US$13.95 for 3 months · US$39.95 a year |
The yearly plan works out at about $3.33 a month. Prices are the ones the page showed in US dollars when we loaded it.
Notice what is not on the Pro list: YouTube. Bilingual subtitles, the click-any-word dictionary and the playback controls (auto-pause, speed, keyboard shortcuts) aren't among the things Pro adds, so on YouTube they're the free product — and the free product is the one most people actually use. Language Reactor's own homepage labels Pro Mode "optional" and says the extension is "already packed with great free features", and that's a fair description.
What the free plan is like in practice
Free Language Reactor is a comprehension tool, and a good one. You watch a video with the original subtitle line over a translated one, click a word you don't know, get its meaning, and keep watching. For understanding what you're watching, it's hard to beat at $0.
Where it stops is the moment you decide a word is worth keeping. On the free plan, the save button lives in PhrasePump — a separate listening exercise — not in the video you're watching. Saving from the subtitles as you go, having those words lit up the next time they appear, and getting them into Anki are all on the Pro side of the line. So the free plan lets you understand without keeping: you look up the same word in three different videos and it doesn't stick, because nothing ever brought it back.
That's the honest test for whether Pro is worth it to you:
- You only want to follow along. Stay free. Nothing on the Pro list changes the watching itself on YouTube.
- You watch Netflix with dubbed audio, or want machine translation there. That's specifically what Pro adds on Netflix, and it's the one feature with no free substitute in Language Reactor.
- You want a vocabulary list you'll actually study. Then you're paying for saving. Take the yearly plan if you're sure — US$39.95 is about 44% less than twelve monthly payments — or look at the free alternatives below first.
Free alternatives, sorted by what you actually want
"Free alternative to Language Reactor" means different things depending on which part you need. One line per need:
| What you want | Free option | How far free goes |
|---|---|---|
| Bilingual subtitles on YouTube | Language Reactor's free plan itself | All the way — none of it is on the Pro list |
| Bilingual subtitles on Netflix | Language Reactor's free plan (with Netflix's own subtitles), or Trancy's free plan, which lists Netflix too | Language Reactor charges for speech recognition and machine translation there; Trancy's free plan includes bilingual subtitles on the platforms it supports |
| Save words and review them, without paying | LingoKeep (YouTube only) | 100 saved cards free, and reviewing them on a spaced-repetition schedule is free with no limit |
| A bigger free word list | Trancy | 100 saved words and 50 saved sentences on its free plan (checked October 2026) |
| Cards in Anki, free | asbplayer + Yomitan + Anki, all free and open source | No cap, but you assemble the toolchain yourself: dictionary extension, AnkiConnect add-on, a note type |
| Firefox | Trancy and asbplayer have official Firefox add-ons | Language Reactor has no official listing on Mozilla's add-on store (the one using its name there is from a different author), and LingoKeep runs only on Chromium browsers |
The Firefox row was checked against Mozilla's add-on store; the Trancy numbers against Trancy's own pricing page; both October 2026.
Where LingoKeep fits, and where it doesn't
Full disclosure: LingoKeep is ours, so here are its limits first. It only works on YouTube, in desktop Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and friends) — no Netflix, no Firefox, no phone app for watching. It covers four languages, Spanish, Japanese, French and German, where Language Reactor covers 40+. If you need Netflix or a language outside those four, Language Reactor's free plan is the better free tool, full stop.
What it does differently is the part Language Reactor charges for. You watch with dual subtitles and click any word for its dictionary entry, as you would there — and saving is one click from the subtitle line, with the sentence and a link back to the second of the video it came from. The first 100 cards are free, and reviewing them on an FSRS schedule is free forever, including on your phone in the browser. Pro ($4.99 a month or $39 a year) removes the 100-card cap and adds Anki export; everything else is on the free plan.
Where to go next
- Choosing between the three big extensions, not just asking about one: Language Reactor vs Trancy vs Migaku
- What LingoKeep's free plan includes, line by line: pricing and features
- Already an Anki user: how LingoKeep exports to Anki
FAQ
Q: Is Language Reactor free? A: Mostly. Bilingual subtitles, the click-a-word dictionary and the playback controls are free with no time limit — on YouTube in full, and on Netflix using the subtitle tracks Netflix provides. Pro adds saving words across the whole app (with highlighting and Anki export), speech recognition and machine translation on Netflix, and stronger AI helpers.
Q: How much is Language Reactor Pro? A: US$5.95 for one month, US$13.95 for three months, or US$39.95 for a year — about $3.33 a month on the yearly plan. Those are the prices Language Reactor's own Pro page showed in US dollars when we checked in October 2026.
Q: Can you save words in Language Reactor for free? A: Only inside PhrasePump, its listening-drill mode. Saving words and phrases everywhere else — including from the subtitles of the video you're watching — plus highlighting saved words throughout the app and exporting them to Anki, are Pro features.
Q: Does Language Reactor work on Netflix for free? A: Yes. The free plan works on Netflix with the subtitle tracks Netflix itself provides. Pro adds speech recognition, which creates subtitles for dubbed audio tracks that Netflix doesn't subtitle correctly, and machine translation.
Q: What's the best free alternative to Language Reactor? A: It depends which part you need. For bilingual subtitles on YouTube, Language Reactor's own free plan is enough; Trancy's free plan covers Netflix and other platforms too. To save words and review them without paying, LingoKeep gives you 100 cards and unlimited free spaced-repetition review, on YouTube only. For free cards in Anki, asbplayer plus Yomitan does it, at the cost of setting up the toolchain yourself.
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