"Spanish or French" is one of the most-searched questions in language learning, and most answers to it are the same paragraph reshuffled: Spanish has more speakers, French sounds nicer, pick whichever you love. That is not a decision procedure, it is a shrug.
Here is a better one - and it generalises, so if your actual question is Italian or Portuguese, or Swedish or Danish, the method is the same.
Start with the measures that actually differ
Comparing two languages is useful only on the axes where they are genuinely different. For Spanish and French, almost everything structural is the same. Both are Romance. Both inflect verbs for person across six slots. Both offer the same six tenses in our conjugation drills. Both have full A1-to-C1 vocabulary and curriculum on Semantix - 80 lessons each, and 370 and 375 authored deck words respectively. Both have neural text-to-speech, so you can hear every card and practise pronunciation against a real voice.
If you were hoping the numbers would pick for you, they won't. They are close enough to be a tie, and that is itself the answer to one common worry: neither is a harder language than the other in any structural sense.
What genuinely differs is narrower and more useful:
Sound-to-spelling. Spanish is close to phonetic - see a word, know how it is said, hear a word, have a decent shot at writing it. French is not: silent final consonants, liaison across word boundaries, several spellings per sound. This is the single biggest practical difference between them, and it is front-loaded. It makes the first three months of Spanish noticeably smoother, and it stops mattering much by B1.
Listening difficulty. Related, and worse. Spoken French runs words together in a way that makes the beginner's core problem - where does one word end - harder for longer. Spanish speakers speak fast, but the boundaries stay audible.
Where the speakers are. Not "how many". Spanish is concentrated in the Americas and Spain; French is spread across Europe, West and North Africa, and Canada. Whichever one is spoken by people you will actually meet, work with, or visit is the one that will get practised - and the language you practise beats the language you chose on paper, every time.
The method, for any pair
- Rule out the structural question first. Look up whether the two differ in
a way that changes the work: does one inflect verbs for person and the other not? Does one have cases? Does one have a writing system you would have to learn separately? For Spanish and French the answer is no across the board - and if that is true of your pair too, stop optimising and move to step 2.
- Weight sound over grammar for the first three months. Whichever you pick,
the early failure mode is not "I can't remember the past tense", it is "I can't tell what they said". A language whose sounds you can already parse gives you a faster start, and a fast start is most of what predicts whether you are still going in month four.
- Pick the one with a person attached. A colleague, a partner's family, a
country you visit, a body of work you want to read untranslated. This dominates every other consideration and it is the one nobody puts in a comparison table.
- Then commit for ninety days. The worst outcome available to you is not
picking the "wrong" one. It is spending three months choosing.
The honest recommendation
If nothing in step 3 tips it: start with Spanish. The phonetic spelling gives you a cleaner first month, and the first month is the one people quit in.
Then learn French second, when you want it - the Romance overlap means the second one costs a fraction of the first. The reverse works too, and everything above applies symmetrically. The order is a small optimisation on top of a much larger fact, which is that either choice is a good one and neither is reversible in any way that matters.
We publish a side-by-side page for every within-family pair - Spanish vs Italian, Swedish vs Danish, Welsh vs Irish and 24 more - and every number on them is computed from the actual shipped course, not written by hand. There is deliberately no "easier" verdict on those pages: we can tell you how many tenses a verb system has, and we would be making up the rest.