Bunpro vs MaruMori (2026): grammar SRS or full course — which one fits how you study

Short answer: Bunpro is a grammar review machine that assumes you are learning Japanese somewhere else. MaruMori is the somewhere else — a structured course that teaches you from kana upward and carries its own SRS, kanji, vocabulary and reading inside one app. Bunpro is cheaper and finishes the JLPT grammar range today. MaruMori is more complete and more expensive, and by its own roadmap it has not finished N1 yet. The choice is really about whether you already have a teacher.

I build BetterLingo from Japan and I study on this kind of stack myself. This page names what each tool is better at instead of picking a winner, and says plainly what BetterLingo is not, near the bottom. Every price and feature claim below was read off the companies' own pages on 27 August 2026.

Why this comparison barely exists

Search bunpro vs marumori and page one is forum threads — Bunpro's own community, WaniKani's community, a Hacker News comment — plus one three-way roundup. There is no dedicated head-to-head anywhere, which is odd, because these two are the closest thing each other has to a direct competitor: both are paid, both are grammar-first, both run an SRS, and both aim at the same learner. So this page is written to be the comparison that did not exist.

What they actually are

Bunpro is a browser-first grammar SRS. You add grammar points to a queue and it shows you fill-in-the-blank sentences at spaced intervals, so you have to produce the form rather than recognise it in a multiple choice list. Each point carries a write-up, example sentences, and cross-references to where that point appears in the common textbooks. Bunpro's own pricing page counts over 900 grammar items and over 10,000 example sentences. Vocabulary decks and reading passages have been bolted on over the years, but grammar is unmistakably the core product.

Crucially, Bunpro does not teach you Japanese. It reviews Japanese. It expects you to meet a grammar point in a textbook, a class, a video or a novel, and then hand it to Bunpro to keep.

MaruMori is an all-in-one course built by Fox Labs, the same team behind Kitsun. Its structure is a gamified world — the "MaruVerse" — of animated islands you progress through, with regions covering PRE-N5 through N1. Inside that structure it does grammar lessons, a grammar SRS on top of those lessons, kanji taught with mnemonics in a build-up order, vocabulary, reading exercises after every five grammar lessons, premade study lists including JLPT lists and anime/game/novel lists, and JLPT mock exams. It starts at hiragana and katakana, which tells you exactly who it is for.

MaruMori also makes a point of saying its grammar lessons are "written and double-checked by a team of language experts and native speakers (NO AI!)". Whether that matters to you is a genuine preference, not a spec.

Price, as published today

Both companies publish their numbers in the open, so there is no guessing here.

  • Bunpro — Free $0 (grammar and vocab pages, reading passages, but no SRS reviews), Premium US$5.00/month, Lifetime US$150.00 one-time. Bunpro's annual price sits behind a toggle that does not render a number to a logged-out visitor, so it is deliberately not quoted here. Bunpro runs sales, announced through its forums and mailing list.
  • MaruMori — Monthly US$8.99, Yearly US$6.99/month billed as US$83.88, Lifetime US$349.99, all with a 14-day trial. A Kitsun lifetime add-on is US$49.99 (from US$199.99) but only alongside a MaruMori lifetime purchase.

So MaruMori is roughly 1.8× Bunpro's monthly price and 2.3× its lifetime price. That gap is the whole argument: you are paying for the course, the kanji curriculum, the vocabulary, the readings and the mock exams that Bunpro does not seriously attempt.

What Bunpro is better at

  • Fitting around something else. If you are in a class, working through Genki or Tobira, or already deep in immersion, Bunpro slots in without asking you to restart. Its textbook cross-references exist precisely for this.
  • Finishing the grammar range today. Bunpro's grammar paths run to N1 now. Nothing is pending.
  • Price. US$150 once, against US$349.99 once. For a tool you may use for three or four years, that is a real difference and not a rounding error.
  • A free tier you can actually read. Every grammar write-up is readable without paying. You lose the SRS — which is the product — but you can use Bunpro as a free grammar reference forever, and plenty of people do.
  • Typed production. You type the conjugation. That is harder and better than picking it from four options, and it is the thing most cheap grammar apps quietly skip.
  • Maturity. It has been running for years and it is stable. Nothing on its core is a roadmap item.

What MaruMori is better at

  • Being a teacher, not a reviewer. It starts at kana and sequences the language for you. Bunpro cannot do this and does not claim to.
  • One app instead of three. The usual stack is a textbook plus Bunpro plus WaniKani or Anki. MaruMori replaces that whole stack, which removes the daily friction of three review queues that do not know about each other.
  • Kanji as a curriculum. Roughly 2,000 kanji taught with mnemonics in an order that builds later characters out of earlier ones, plus 6,000+ more studiable on demand, and 8,000 vocabulary through the course against a dictionary of 180,000+.
  • Reading built into the sequence. A reading exercise every five grammar lessons, using only what you have just learned, with audio and translations. Graded reading that is actually graded to you is rare.
  • JLPT mock exams, including listening sections — Bunpro has nothing equivalent.
  • Motivation design. Islands, achievements, heatmaps, study friends. If gamification works on you, this is the one that has it.
  • Mobile apps on iOS and Android.

Where each one fails

Bunpro's failures: it is not a first teacher, so a true beginner who buys it alone will stall — you will be reviewing forms nobody explained to you in sequence. Its kanji and vocabulary are secondary features and it shows. There is nothing in it designed to make you come back tomorrow other than the review count, which works right up until the day it does not. And the free tier withholds the SRS, so "free forever" means "a free reference", not a free study tool.

MaruMori's failures: the price. Also, and this matters if you are aiming at the top of the JLPT, MaruMori's own public roadmap still lists "Advanced (N2) Content Done!" as work in progress and "Expert (N1) Content Start!" under Phase 6, "2026 & Beyond". The islands span PRE-N5 to N1; the finished content does not yet. If you are studying for N1 in the next year, buy Bunpro and check back on MaruMori later. The gamified frame is also load-bearing — if animated islands and achievements make you cringe, you will be paying a premium for a layer you resent. And all-in-one cuts both ways: you cannot swap out the module you dislike, because it is the same subscription as the modules you like.

How to choose, in one line each

  • You are in a class or a textbook already. Bunpro. Do not pay for a second course.
  • You are starting from zero with no teacher and no textbook. MaruMori. Bunpro will not teach you and you will quit.
  • You are chasing N1 within the year. Bunpro, because its N1 grammar exists today.
  • You bounce off self-study and need something to pull you back. MaruMori, and take the 14-day trial before the lifetime plan.
  • You are on a budget. Bunpro free as a grammar reference, plus Anki for kanji and vocabulary. It is uglier and it costs nothing.
  • You already own WaniKani. Bunpro — see Bunpro vs WaniKani — since MaruMori's kanji curriculum would duplicate what you have already paid for.

Where BetterLingo sits, and what it is not

Being honest about this is the only reason a page like this is worth reading. BetterLingo is not an SRS and it is not a course. It has no deck library, no card editor, no dictionary import, no textbook mapping, no kanji curriculum, no mnemonics, and no gamified world. It will not replace either tool on this page, this year or next.

What it does is narrow: it is a JLPT practice tool that marks written answers. You write a real sentence or a free-form response, and it tells you what is wrong with it and why. Bunpro's fill-in-the-blank checks whether you can produce one form in a slot someone else built; MaruMori's exercises check the same thing inside a lesson. Neither reads a sentence you wrote yourself. That gap is the whole reason BetterLingo exists, and it is a small tool that is new, run by one person, and does one thing.

If you want the honest version of the wider landscape, the Bunpro alternatives page covers the rest of the field, and Genki vs Bunpro covers the textbook question this page deliberately skipped.

Next steps

Pick the one that matches your situation from the list above, take the free tier or the trial before you pay for anything, and give it two weeks of real daily use before deciding. If you want to test whether you can actually write the grammar you have been reviewing, that is the part BetterLingo was built for.