Pleco Review: Is the Chinese Dictionary App Worth It?

Pleco is the best free Chinese dictionary app, and almost every learner should install it. The free version has no ads, no subscription and no time limit, and it's all many beginners need. The paid add-ons are one-off purchases: the camera lookup (OCR), flashcards and document reader are worth buying if you read a lot of real Chinese, while the extra dictionaries are mainly for advanced learners and translators. Keep in mind what it is: a dictionary and reading tool, not a course. It won't teach you Chinese in order; it helps you look up whatever you meet.

A word on bias: we make Mandarin Mosaic, a different kind of app (vocabulary through sentences), and we use Pleco ourselves. Pleco isn't ours and we earn nothing from it. Prices and features are from pleco.com, Pleco's online store, the UK and US App Store and Google Play, checked on 2 November 2026.

Pleco at a Glance

Is Pleco Free? What You Get Without Paying

Yes. Pleco is a free download on the App Store and Google Play, and the free version isn't a trial. Pleco says on its products page that you'll "never get a popup nagging you to buy anything", and that it compares itself to an e-book store: some books are free, others you pay for. The free app includes:

• Two dictionaries: CC-CEDICT, the open-source dictionary, and Pleco's own PLC dictionary, with parts of speech and thousands of example sentences with pinyin. More free dictionaries can be downloaded, including a Cantonese one.
• The full search engine: search by characters, by pinyin with or without tones (type xuesheng and you get 学生, xuésheng, student), or by English, with wildcards and full-text search. Results from every dictionary you have are merged into one list.
• Handwriting input: draw a character you can't type. It's tolerant of stroke-order mistakes.
• A clipboard reader: copy Chinese text from anywhere, paste it into Pleco's reader and tap any word to look it up. On Android, a free Screen Reader goes further, with a floating button that looks up words in other apps.
• Basic audio: on iPhone, words and example sentences are read by the phone's built-in text-to-speech; on Android you hear syllables stitched together from recordings.
• Stroke order animations for 500 common characters.
• Traditional and Simplified characters, with pinyin or zhuyin, everywhere in the app.

What the free version doesn't have: camera lookup (OCR), the full flashcard system (Android has a minimal free version; iPhone has none), opening files in the document reader, native-speaker word recordings and the larger dictionaries. For a beginner using a course or a textbook, the free version is often enough for months.

Pleco's Paid Add-ons and Bundles: Prices

There's no "Pleco Premium" subscription, though that's what many people search for. Everything paid is a separate add-on that you buy once and keep. You can buy them in the app (through Apple or Google) or from Pleco's own online store, which is cheaper for the bundles because Pleco doesn't pay the app store's commission. A purchase from the website is activated by entering your Registration ID in the app.

The two bundles

According to Pleco's pricing page, the bundles contain:

• Basic Bundle: OCR, flashcards, stroke order diagrams, the document reader, Mandarin audio and the Kai font, plus the Oxford Chinese Dictionary.
• Professional Bundle: everything in the Basic Bundle plus six dictionaries (Oxford Chinese, ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive, ABC English-Chinese, New Century English-Chinese, Tuttle Chinese-English and the Chinese–Chinese Guifan dictionary) and a male text-to-speech voice.

At the time of writing (2 November 2026), these are the prices:

Sources: the in-app purchase lists on the UK and US App Store listings, and Pleco's online store. Pleco's pricing pages give the same in-app bundle prices (US$29.99 and $59.99) for iPhone and Android; Google Play's listing doesn't show individual add-on prices, so check them in the app's Add-ons screen.

The individual dictionaries are priced separately on Pleco's store, for example the Oxford Chinese Dictionary at $19.99, the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive at $14.99 and the Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters (Essentials) at $29.99. Pleco also sells graded readers that open in its reader, such as Mandarin Companion titles at $7.99 each, and extra text-to-speech voices at $9.99 each.

The bundle is the obvious buy if you want two or more of the main features. On the UK App Store, OCR, flashcards and the document reader cost £9.99 each, so the three together cost exactly what the Basic Bundle does, and the bundle adds stroke order, audio, a font and the Oxford dictionary on top. On Pleco's website, the Basic Bundle is $24.99, less than those three bought separately.

Your purchases aren't tied to one phone. Pleco's how to buy page says a licence works on up to three devices at a time, on iPhone and Android alike, by entering the same Registration ID, and that it has never charged for a version upgrade.

Which Add-ons Are Worth Buying?

• You're a beginner following a course or textbook: stay on the free version. You need to look words up, and the free dictionaries, handwriting and clipboard reader do that well.
• You read real Chinese (WeChat messages, articles, e-books, signs and menus in China): the Basic Bundle. The document reader and OCR are the features you'll use most, and the bundle costs the same as those two plus flashcards.
• You want to review the words you look up: the Flashcard System, alone or in the bundle. If you already keep flashcards in Anki, you may not need it: our best Chinese flashcard apps compares the two.
• You're learning to write characters: Stroke Order Diagrams (£4.99) cover about 28,000 characters, against 500 free.
• You want native-speaker audio for words: Mandarin Audio, with recordings of over 34,000 words, if the free text-to-speech isn't good enough for you.
• You're advanced, a translator or a university student: the Professional Bundle, for the larger Chinese-English, English-Chinese and Chinese–Chinese dictionaries. Below intermediate level, the free dictionaries are usually enough.

If you're unsure, start free and buy later: add-ons can be bought one at a time, and Pleco doesn't push you to buy them.

The Features Worth Knowing

OCR: look up words with the camera

The paid Optical Character Recognizer lets you point your camera at Chinese text, or open a photo or screenshot, and look up the words in it. It's the feature that helps most with signs, menus and textbook pages: point it at 宫保鸡丁 on a menu and you get gōngbǎo jīdīng, kung pao chicken. It's also the feature users disagree about most (see what users say): some find it excellent, others find live mode fiddly unless the phone is held very still. Pleco has been testing a new OCR algorithm, which you can switch on in Settings / OCR on iPhone (added in version 3.2.80, October 2025, and refined in March 2026), and the May 2026 Android update overhauled its experimental OCR.

The reader: tap words in any text

The free clipboard reader is the feature many learners use most: copy a WeChat message or a paragraph of a web article, open the reader, and tap any word for its entry. The paid Document Reader opens whole files: TXT, EPUB, DOC, DOCX, PDF and web pages on iPhone, and TXT, EPUB and PDF on Android. On Android, the Screen Reader puts a floating button over other apps so you can look words up without copying anything (the text reader is free; screen OCR is paid).

Handwriting and search

Pleco's search is fast and forgiving. You can type pinyin without tones or spaces, mix characters and pinyin, search in English, or draw a character with your finger. The handwriting recogniser is free; an Enhanced Handwriting add-on (£9.99 on the UK App Store) is sold separately, but Pleco's product pages don't spell out what it adds, so try the free one first. If you'd rather type characters than draw them, set up a pinyin keyboard on your phone (our guide on how to type Chinese covers every device), or use our free online Chinese keyboard on a computer.

Flashcards

With the Flashcard System, any word you look up becomes a card with one tap. It has spaced repetition, several test types including fill-in-the-blank and tone drills, and ready-made word lists to import; the August 2026 iPhone update (version 3.2.83) added cards for the refreshed 2026 HSK 3.0 vocabulary, with shorter definitions for about 100 words. The catch is set-up: there are a lot of settings, and several reviewers say it's hard to work out what they do. Moving cards between an Android phone and an iPhone means backing up and restoring a database file, following Pleco's FAQ.

Stroke order and audio

Stroke-order animations show how each character is written; Pleco notes that Traditional characters are shown in mainland (PRC) stroke order. For audio, the free app uses text-to-speech, and the Mandarin Audio add-ons give you recordings from native speakers, male and female, for over 34,000 words. Extra higher-quality text-to-speech voices, including Taiwan Mandarin and Cantonese, are sold separately.

What Users Say

Pleco's ratings are high everywhere: 4.6 out of 5 from 289 ratings on the UK App Store, 4.7 from 1.9K on the US App Store and 4.7 from 44.3K reviews on Google Play, where it has over 5 million downloads. Of the 150 most recent written reviews on the US App Store (August 2020 to October 2026), 126 give five stars and only 3 give one or two.

What people like:

• One-off prices. A US reviewer who has used it for ten years and bought flashcards, stroke order and audio wrote in October 2026: "The costs are one-time, and well worth it!" Another praised the team for "not being greedy and trying to gouge us like almost every language app."
• No ads. "I love that the free version doesn't have ads," wrote a US reviewer in April 2026.
• It's the standard tool. A UK reviewer in October 2026 called it "THE app for learners of Chinese", and a Mandarin teacher on the UK store said it's "the app I recommend all students get familiar with right away".
• The reader. Reviewers mention pasting whole sentences in and getting every word broken down, and reading social media posts with tap lookups.

What people complain about:

• OCR. The same October 2026 UK reviewer gave five stars "except for the broken garbage OCR". A US reviewer in July 2026 said of live OCR: "you have to hold the phone really still and even then its touch and go". Others say it works well, and a Google Play reviewer in June 2025 praised the updated Screen OCR.
• Complicated flashcards. One April 2026 reviewer found the flashcards quick to create but "not very straightforward to configure", and said: "I'm going to stick to Anki for flashcards because it's just more straightforward."
• Example sentences. A September 2026 reviewer wished for simpler definitions, saying "sometimes you look up a word and the sentence examples are far from something useful."
• Not a translator. A UK tourist gave one star in October 2026: "It may be useful for people learning Chinese, but in my experience, it was not a practical travel translation app." Another reviewer said it's "best for single words and has trouble with some phrases."
• No desktop or easy sync. Reviewers ask for a Mac version, and one couldn't get flashcards from a phone onto an iPad.

Pros and Cons

What Pleco Doesn't Do

Pleco is a tool for looking things up, and it's very good at that. It doesn't decide what you should learn next, teach grammar in order, or check your speaking. Its example sentences come from dictionaries, so they're chosen to illustrate a word, not to be at your level: a beginner can look up a simple word and get an example full of words they don't know. And because it works word by word, it won't translate a paragraph for you; that's a job for a translation app. You'll still want something to learn from, whether that's a course, a textbook or a teacher. Our round-up of the best Mandarin learning apps covers the courses, and lists Pleco as the dictionary to install alongside them.

Pleco vs Other Chinese Dictionary Apps

These are the apps people most often weigh against Pleco. The details are from each app's own website and store listing, checked on 2 November 2026.

Hanping is the closest rival: also free with one-off purchases, no ads and no account, with CC-CEDICT built in, and it has been on Android since 2009. It has fewer licensed dictionaries than Pleco, but many people like its simpler design. Google Translate is better when you need a whole sentence translated, but it gives you one answer rather than a dictionary entry, so it's weaker for learning what each word means. It's worth keeping both. Du Chinese isn't a dictionary app at all, but its tap-to-look-up dictionary means you rarely need Pleco while reading its stories.

Pleco and a Sentence App

Looking a word up once rarely makes it stick; you need to meet it again, in context, a few more times. That's the gap between a dictionary and learning, and it's the one our app, Mandarin Mosaic, is built for. It teaches vocabulary through real sentences that each contain one new word, with audio and spaced repetition. When you look up a word in Pleco that you want to keep, you can add it to Mandarin Mosaic's Focus Words, and it brings that word back in different sentences until you know it. It doesn't replace Pleco: it has no dictionary search, handwriting or camera lookup. See how it compares with other ways of doing this in our guide to sentence mining apps for Chinese.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pleco Free?

Yes. The basic app is free on iPhone and Android, with no ads, no subscription and no time limit. It includes two dictionaries, handwriting, search, a clipboard reader and basic audio. Extra features and dictionaries are optional one-off purchases.

Is Pleco Premium Worth It?

There's no Premium subscription; people usually mean the paid add-ons. The Basic Bundle (£29.99 or US$29.99 in the app, $24.99 on Pleco's website, at the time of writing) is worth it if you read real Chinese text regularly or want flashcards built into your dictionary. If you're a beginner working through a course, the free version is enough to start with.

Does Pleco Work Offline?

Yes. Pleco's FAQ says it needs the internet only to download and activate things; after that, every feature works offline. Reviewers who have lived in China often mention it.

Is Pleco on Android?

Yes. It's on Google Play for Android 9 or later, and Pleco also offers it as a direct download from its website for phones without Google Play. Add-ons bought on iPhone can be activated on Android with the same Registration ID, and the other way round.

Is There a Pleco Desktop App?

Not yet. Pleco's FAQ says a desktop version is being worked on, Mac first and probably Windows later, and that the Android app works on Chromebooks. Pleco 4.0 is in beta testing on iPhone.

Are There Pleco Discount Codes?

We didn't find any coupon codes on Pleco's site. The real saving is buying the bundles from Pleco's own online store ($24.99 and $49.99 instead of $29.99 and $59.99 in the app). The "code" you'll see mentioned most is your Registration ID: a 12-letter ID that activates your purchases on another device.

Can I Share Pleco Add-ons With My Family?

Yes, in Pleco's own way. It doesn't use Apple's Family Sharing, but a purchase can be activated on up to three devices at a time, on any platform, by entering the same Registration ID.

How Do You Pronounce Pleco?

Pleco's founder, Michael Love, says "plee-co", with a long e. The app is named after a type of aquarium catfish he kept as a child, which is why searching for "pleco" also brings up fish.

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