What is Mondly?
Mondly is a Romanian-built app, acquired by Pearson in 2022, that offers the same course structure in 41 languages. You get a daily lesson, themed units (greetings, travel, food, business), a chatbot that walks through scripted conversations, weekly quizzes and monthly challenges. Indonesian is included; Malay is not on the list.
The free tier gives one short lesson a day. Premium unlocks everything for one language, and there are “all languages” and lifetime plans that are often heavily discounted.
What Mondly does well
Polish and pacing. The app looks good, the lessons are short, and the streak, quiz and challenge loop gives a steady sense of progress. The native-speaker audio is clear, speech recognition works well enough to make you say things aloud, and the chatbot — though scripted — is a comfortable first step toward conversation.
Price is a strength too: the annual plan works out at a few dollars a month, and the lifetime plan can be a one-off purchase for all 41 languages.
Where Mondly falls short
Mondly’s Indonesian course was clearly produced by filling a template built for European languages. The topics, sentence frames and even the grammar pop-ups are generic, so the things that make Indonesian distinctive — the me-/ber-/-kan affixes, reduplication, the formal/informal pronoun system — are glossed over or missing. After a few weeks the lessons feel repetitive.
Vocabulary is limited, review is basic, and there is nothing to read beyond the scripted dialogues. And Mondly has no Malay: for a learner heading to Malaysia or Singapore, or simply curious how the two languages relate, it offers nothing.
How BahasaSystem.com compares
BahasaSystem.com was built for exactly these two languages rather than adapted from a template. Its 1,500 words are the most common Indonesian words, levelled and grouped into 41 themes, and every card carries the Malay equivalent with a flag on the 680+ that differ — plus a switchable Indonesian or Malay voice.
For input there are 90+ dialogues and news articles at three levels with line-by-line audio and quizzes, and for retention an Interval Study deck using FSRS. There is no chatbot and no speech recognition; the focus is words, reading and review, and it is free with no daily cap.
The verdict: which should you choose?
Mondly is a fine, cheap daily-lesson app for a beginner who wants a bit of everything in a tidy package. BahasaSystem.com is the better tool for vocabulary, reading and anything involving Malay — and it is free.
If you already have a Mondly lifetime plan, keep it for the chatbot and use BahasaSystem.com for the words it never reaches and the Malay it does not have.