These four products are not four versions of the same thing. Weglot is a layer that makes your existing site multilingual. Lokalise is a translation management system for teams. Smartling pairs a management platform with human translation services. DeepL is a translation engine — powerful, but on its own it does not publish a single web page. What decides your bill is different in each case too: stored translated words, processed words, per-word service rates, or per-character API usage.
Starter plan. Business (€29/mo) is where most real sites land. Prices in EUR, excl. VAT.
Explorer plan, billed yearly ($169/mo monthly). No free plan — 14-day trial.
Free-to-start Core plan; Enterprise is quote-based. Translation services from $0.0075/word.
API Pro: $5.49/mo plus $25 per 1M characters. Translator app plans from $8.74/mo billed yearly.
| Weglot | Lokalise | Smartling | DeepL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Website translation layer for your existing site | Translation management system (TMS) for teams | TMS + translation services (machine, AI, human) | Translation engine (app + API). Not a website platform |
| Best for | Businesses that want a multilingual site live in days, not months | SaaS / product companies localizing site, app and docs continuously | Enterprises with high content volume and brand / quality requirements | Developers and teams building translation into their own stack |
| How you are charged | Total translated words you store, across all languages — a fixed allowance that does not renew monthly — plus a language cap per plan. Separate monthly cap on translation requests (≈ translated page views) | Processed words (source words actively translated) + advanced seats. Stored (hosted) words unlimited; translator / reviewer seats unlimited | Platform fee (not published, quote-based) + per-word service rates by tier: MT from $0.0075, AI from $0.06, AI + human from $0.12, human from $0.20 | API: per source character ($5.49/mo + $25 per 1M characters). Translator app: per user, with monthly character allowances |
| Entry price | Free plan (2,000 words, 1 language). Paid from €15/mo — real sites usually need Business €29/mo or Pro €79/mo | No free plan. Explorer $149/mo billed yearly ($169 monthly), 14-day trial | Core is free to start for small-scale projects; Enterprise is custom-quoted | Translator Free (50,000 characters/mo). API has a free developer tier — its allowance structure has been changing, so check the current terms |
| How your site goes live | Weglot serves translated versions of your pages itself (subdirectory / subdomain) | Translations are pushed back into your CMS or codebase — your stack serves the pages | Global Delivery Network translation proxy, or connectors into your CMS | It doesn't serve pages. Your CMS, plugin or TMS must do that |
| Multilingual SEO | Server-side plans: language subdirectories or subdomains, automatic hreflang, translated metadata and (Pro+) translated URL slugs. The JavaScript integration offers no SEO benefit, per Weglot's own help center | Depends on your CMS setup — Lokalise manages the text, not your URLs or hreflang | Handled by the GDN proxy setup: localized URLs and metadata are part of its design (Enterprise) | Not provided — hreflang, language URLs and sitemaps are your responsibility |
| Human translation / review | Professional translation can be ordered inside the dashboard, published from €0.13/word, billed separately | You bring your own translators or agencies; unlimited reviewer seats. No public per-word rate — it's a workflow tool, not a translation vendor | Core part of the offer: AI + human tier from $0.12/word and full human translation from $0.20/word (starting rates) | No human option. Machine translation only — any review workflow is yours to build |
| Trade-off to know | Costs jump in plan steps, not smoothly: one word past a limit can move you up a whole tier, and adding languages multiplies your stored word count | Priced for ongoing teams, not one-off website jobs; needs a CMS / dev workflow around it before a single page goes live | You cannot budget the platform fee from the website — real pricing needs a sales conversation | Cheapest translation per word here, but the comparison is engine-only: hosting, delivery and quality control are extra work and cost |
Prices checked November 2026. Weglot prices are in EUR excluding VAT (USD figures on its site are estimates). Lokalise plan allowances for processed words are drawn from third-party analyses of its pricing page (October 2026) because the official page's allowance figures could not be read as text at check time — confirm them in the live pricing table before buying. Smartling's per-word figures are published starting rates for translation services and exclude its platform fee. Plans change — always confirm on the vendor's site.
"Per month" prices hide the real question, because each vendor counts something different. These examples use only published prices, with the arithmetic shown. Assume a business site with pages averaging 800 words each.
Weglot counts source words × target languages, stored in your account. One language: 24,000 translated words — that already exceeds Starter (10,000), so you land on Business at €290/year. Three languages: 72,000 words, past Business's 50,000 cap, so Pro at €790/year. Five languages: 120,000 words — still inside Pro, so still €790/year. The lesson is the step shape: going from three languages to five costs nothing, but crossing one plan boundary costs a full tier.
Weglot: 240,000 stored words pushes you past Pro (200,000) to Advanced — €2,990/year. The same site in one language would be €790/year, so languages, not pages, are what multiply this bill.
DeepL API: at roughly 6 characters per word including spaces, 80,000 words is about 480,000 characters per language, or 1.44 million characters for three. At $25 per million characters that is $36 of translation, plus the $5.49/month base fee — around $102 for a first year. That is engine cost only: you still need something to serve, route and index the translated pages.
Lokalise: the first translation run processes roughly 240,000 words, which reported plan allowances put beyond Explorer — Growth at $379/mo billed yearly ($4,548/year) — because you are paying for a continuous localization workflow, not a one-time website job.
Smartling: 240,000 translated words at published starting rates is $1,800 for machine translation, $14,400 for AI Translation, $28,800 for AI + human, or $48,000 for human translation — plus a platform fee that is only available by quote, and volume terms will move these numbers. What the table shows is not a quote; it is what you are actually buying in each model: engine time, workflow, or human quality.
Ordering professional translation for the entire 30-page, 3-language site in Example 1 through Weglot would start at 72,000 words × €0.13 = €9,360 — roughly twelve times the Pro plan itself. Restricting human review to your ten most-visited pages (8,000 source words × 3 languages) starts at €3,120. The practical pattern this maths points to: machine-translate everything, spend human review only where mistranslation is expensive — pricing, terms, checkout, and your top landing pages.
How the counting works, because the same phrase means different things: Weglot counts each unique translated word once and it stays counted while the translation is stored (delete translations and the allowance frees up) — you pay for inventory. Lokalise does not charge for storage at all; it charges when words are processed — imported, first translated, or re-translated after the source text changes — you pay for activity. DeepL's API charges for every call, including re-translating edited text into every language, unless your own system caches results; document uploads also carry a 50,000-character minimum charge per file. Smartling quotes factor in translation-memory reuse, so repeated segments should not be priced as brand-new words — confirm how that is applied in your quote.
Weglot connects to your existing site — WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Squarespace or a custom build — detects your content, translates it automatically, and serves the translated versions under language subdirectories (example.com/fr/) or subdomains, with hreflang tags added automatically. You then edit translations in a visual editor, set glossary rules, and optionally order professional translation from the dashboard at published rates from €0.13/word. Plans are set by two numbers: total stored translated words and languages. Free covers 2,000 words in 1 language; Starter (€15/mo, €150/yr) 10,000 words / 1 language; Business (€29/mo, €290/yr) 50,000 / 3; Pro (€79/mo, €790/yr) 200,000 / 5; Advanced (€299/mo, €2,990/yr) 1,000,000 / 10; Extended (€699/mo, €6,990/yr) 5,000,000 / 20. Annual billing works out to two months free. All plans include a 14-day trial.
Lokalise is a translation management system: content flows in from your CMS, code repository, design files or help center, gets translated and reviewed in one workspace, and flows back out. For websites it connects to WordPress (via WPML or Polylang plus the Lokalise plugin), Contentful, Storyblok, Webflow and others, among 60+ integrations, plus an API for custom pipelines. Automatic translation can run on DeepL, Google or Lokalise's own AI tiers. Pricing combines processed words with advanced seats (managers, developers, content creators — 5 up to 100 by tier), while translator and reviewer seats and stored words are unlimited. Explorer is $149/mo billed yearly ($169 monthly), Growth $379/mo billed yearly ($439 monthly), Advanced $1,049/mo billed yearly, and Enterprise is custom. There is no free plan; a 14-day trial runs at Enterprise feature level.
Smartling combines a translation management platform with translation services you buy by the word, in tiers that trade price for human involvement: machine translation from $0.0075/word, fully automated AI Translation from $0.06/word, AI-Powered Human Translation from $0.12/word, and human translation from $0.20/word (published starting rates; platform fees, desktop publishing and managed services are separate). Websites are delivered through its Global Delivery Network — a translation proxy that sits over your existing site and serves localized versions — or via 50+ connectors into CMS, marketing and code systems. Plans are a free-to-start Core tier aimed at small-scale projects and a custom-quoted Enterprise tier with customizable workflows, unlimited translation memory and the GDN.
DeepL sells translation itself, in two separate products that do not share allowances. The Translator app plans are per user: Free allows 50,000 characters a month; Individual ($8.74/mo billed yearly) 300,000 characters and 3 file translations a month; Team ($28.74/user/mo billed yearly) 1,000,000 characters per user and 20 files; Business ($57.49/user/mo billed yearly) unlimited characters under a fair-use policy and 100 files. The API is the website-relevant product: API Pro costs $5.49/mo plus $25 per million characters, billed on source characters. Neither product serves web pages, creates language URLs, adds hreflang, or provides a language switcher — something else (your CMS, a plugin, or a TMS like Lokalise, which offers DeepL as an engine) has to turn translated text into a multilingual website. Prices also vary by region; the same Translator plans are listed in euros, VAT included, for European visitors.
A live multilingual website → Weglot or Smartling's GDN. A workflow for a team that ships content in many languages → Lokalise or Smartling's platform. Translation as a raw ingredient for your own stack → DeepL API. Most bad purchases here are category errors, not product failures.
Use your CMS word count (Weglot offers a free counting tool). Source words × languages is the number that sets Weglot's tier and roughly sizes everyone else's bill. Then ask what happens when you add one more language next year — and price that plan, not today's.
Stable content you keep for years fits stored-word pricing (Weglot) or unlimited storage (Lokalise). Content you edit constantly re-bills under per-call API pricing (DeepL) and consumes processed words (Lokalise). High-churn catalogs and news sites should model the editing cost, not just the launch cost.
Full human translation of a whole site costs many times the platform fee (Example 3). Machine-translate the long tail, and spend the human budget on pricing, legal, checkout and top landing pages. If that review needs managing at scale, that — not word price — is the argument for Smartling or Lokalise.
Most website translation is metered in words, but the word being counted differs. Weglot counts translated words stored in your account across all languages (source words × languages), as a fixed total that does not reset each month. Lokalise counts source words as they are processed. Smartling charges per source word at a rate set by how much human work is involved. DeepL's API counts characters instead of words. Comparing monthly prices without comparing the unit is meaningless — run your own word count through each model first, as in the worked examples above.
It depends on why you are leaving. If the stored-word tiers are the problem and your content changes often, Lokalise's processed-word model charges for activity instead of inventory. If you need human-reviewed quality as part of the service, Smartling is the alternative built for that. If you have developers and want the cheapest possible translation, a DeepL API integration undercuts Weglot's subscription — but you take over delivery, SEO structure and editing workflows yourself. There is no single best alternative; there is a best alternative per reason.
DeepL can translate your website's text, but it cannot publish your website. It provides no hosting, no language-specific URLs, no hreflang tags and no language switcher. In practice DeepL reaches websites in two ways: through the API, wired into your CMS or codebase by a developer, or as the translation engine inside another tool — Lokalise, for example, offers DeepL as one of its automatic translation engines. Budget for the delivery layer, not just the engine.
For low-stakes pages, many businesses publish machine translation after a native-speaker spot check. The risk concentrates where wording carries obligations: prices, terms, cancellation and safety information, where a mistranslation becomes a business problem rather than a style problem. This guide takes no position on which engine is "best" — we did not test output quality. The defensible approach from published pricing alone is to machine-translate broadly and buy human review selectively, by page importance (see Example 3).
Only if each language version has its own indexable URL and correct hreflang signals. Weglot's subdirectory and subdomain setups and Smartling's GDN are designed to provide that; Weglot's JavaScript integration explicitly does not. With Lokalise or DeepL, ranking depends on your CMS multilingual configuration, because they supply translated text, not page structure. Check this before choosing — a translation nobody can find in search is a cost, not an asset.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing, not from hands-on testing. Where a judgment appears — for example, that Weglot's pricing jumps in steps — it is arithmetic on published numbers, shown next to the claim so you can check it yourself.