I tried duolingo for learning French... after a while, it gets boring...

I didn't like it. I prefer to study with Memrise, and I also prefer the old-fashioned of studying grammar.

Just a part of my learning toolkit, it got me going with French. Without it I wouldn't have gotten into it, I believe. For Spanish  I'd use a different approach, though - Spanishdict.

As for verb conjugations, it depends on people. There are always those who want to learn stuff by books and tables. I picked up simple conjugations just by seeing sentences in Duolingo.

What D does well is the community aspect. Each question has a direct link to a discussion about it, and knowledgeable people, often native speakers explain finer nuances of why one might use one construct in this context and another one in that. That alone makes me stick with the course, otherwise I would have given up by now. M has course-specific forums, but they're not as useful and not as active either. D also has a pure listening mode, M doesn't (I wish they did). M's multiple choice presentation is better.

M is crowdsourced, individual courses are mostly by individual people, so course quality might differ more than on D. The 2 courses I've started are both solid. D is also crowdsourcing now but it's a community thing and an involved process. M has more languages and more choice within languages.

I think that's about it.  Hope it helps.

M lets me know what's coming, I always feel comfortable. Units are the same length, I can pick 5, 10, or 30 words to learn in one session. D throws units at me with anywhere from 7 to 30+ sentences. M introduces each word/expression with audio and translation first before testing me, D gives me new words within sentences without introduction -- I can hover to get translations, but they're not always on point. Worse, it does that with idioms as well. I am always feeling just slightly off-balance. Sometimes I get some grammar (in light grey text on white which is hard to read), sometimes not. M includes the grammar more organically.

D doesn't allow me to pick the progression, I am locked into their "tree", though I can test out of it. M lets me pick where I want to go -- not a concern for me right now, but somebody who isn't a beginner might appreciate that. I think I prefer the D approach slightly for this.

D automates a lot, which means I get some real nonsense sentences at times. Memrise always gives me natural sounding sentences. I think D does not follow a lexemic frequency progression, and especially at the start I learned some stuff that was weird. M is a lot more on track with that. The progression on M is really good-- one can actually derive the grammar from how conjugated verbs are presented. Not so on D, it's all a jumble.

D does more gamification. I don't really care about artificial points and I find their "fluency" badge to be utter nonsense. In which universe is knowing 520 words "45% fluent" -- even if I actually knew them, which I demonstrably don't. M uses the metaphor of growing and watering a flower for each word, which is growing on me (ha).

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