The best localization tools

What a localization tool does

A translation management system, or TMS, is where you manage the translated text for your app, game or website. But "localization tool" can also mean an API that translates strings, or software you host yourself.

What do you need to manage? That's the question to settle before comparing plans. A string limit, a word allowance and a per-character translation price aren't the same thing, even when they all show up as a monthly bill.

There's no single best choice here. Start with the kind of setup you want, then look at what each plan includes.

For developers and small teams

As of November 2026, Lokalise starts with Explorer at $149 a month, followed by Growth at $379 and Advanced at $1,049, with custom pricing for Enterprise, and you can try it for 14 days without a card.

That's a higher starting price than the other paid entry plans in this section. If you're considering Lokalise, use the trial before committing.

Crowdin is free for public projects. For private projects, Pro is $75 a month, while Team is $450 a month. There's a 14-day trial.

The public-versus-private distinction matters here. If your project is public, compare Crowdin's free option before treating its paid plans as your starting point.

POEditor gives you a different way to compare costs: its plans are tied to string counts. It's free up to 1,000 strings. Start costs $20 a month for 3,000 strings, and Plus costs $60 for 10,000. Premium is $160 for 30,000, while Enterprise is $260 for 100,000. Paying yearly takes 15% off.

Count your strings first. You can then compare your project with those limits rather than picking a plan by its name.

Localazy's Professional plan is $34 a month, or $408 a year, with 12,000 words included. You get a 14-day trial. Notice the unit: words, not strings. Don't put its allowance beside POEditor's and read them as equivalent.

For larger teams and enterprises

Phrase's Team plan costs $1,245 a month billed annually, or €1,195 in euros. It includes unlimited TMS seats and 20 Strings seats. Business and Enterprise have custom pricing, and there's a 14-day free trial.

Keep those seat types separate. "Unlimited" applies to TMS seats, not the Strings seats included in Team.

Smartling's Core plan is free to start, with translation priced by the word. Prices start at $0.0075 for machine translation, $0.06 for AI translation, $0.12 for AI with human review and $0.20 for human translation.

Here, the choice of translation type is part of the price comparison. Put the rate for the option you want beside your word count; the free starting plan isn't the whole cost.

Open source options

Tolgee has a free plan with 30,000 words and 3 seats. Paid cloud plans start at €58 a month billed annually. It's also open source and can be self-hosted.

You don't have to self-host it. The cloud plans are a separate option to consider.

Weblate is libre software under GPLv3+ and is free to self-host. Hosted plans start at €47 a month or €470 a year, and there's a free Libre plan for public projects. Cloud plans have a 14-day trial.

For a public project, that gives you another free hosted option to compare with Crowdin. If self-hosting is your requirement, both Weblate and Tolgee belong on your list.

When you only need translated strings

You might be looking for a translation API rather than a TMS. Translinga, made by Bitgate, is an early-access API for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps. You request a key through the Get early access button on translinga.com (no card needed).

Its CLI and GitHub Action sync locale files on every push, translating only new and changed strings. The command is npx translinga sync --to nl,de,fr. It reads i18next, next-intl, vue-i18n and any JSON. Key names count as context, and you can add a $context note to explain what the strings are for.

Fast costs $2.50 per million characters; Quality costs $5.00 per million. Spaces count, once per target language. Prepaid credit starts at $5 and never expires. The first $1 is free, about 400,000 characters on Fast.