WebTranslateIt vs Lokalise

Lokalise is a well-designed product with a strong following, particularly among teams where design and localization overlap. This page covers where the two differ and where Lokalise is the better answer.

Checked 11 September 2026 against lokalise.com/pricing and our pricing page.

Pricing#

Lokalise’s published tiers, billed annually:

Credit where it is due: hosted words and standard seats are unlimited on every Lokalise tier. That is a genuinely generous structure and it removes the volume anxiety that a word-metered competitor creates. What the tiers meter instead is processed words (from 60K a year on Explorer up to 3M on Enterprise, with add-on bundles), Pro AI translated words (an add-on on Explorer, 40K a year on Growth, 150K on Advanced), and advanced seats — extra ones are $100 a year on Explorer. There is a 14-day trial and no permanent free tier.

WebTranslateIt, billed annually: €65/month for 5,000 segments, €165 for 10,000, €332 for 50,000 — €780, €1,980 and €3,984 a year, with unlimited languages and projects on every plan, and 10 / 50 / unlimited users. There is also a free Micro plan capped at 500 source segments.

Three structural differences:

Content versus capacity. Our tiers are shaped around how much source content exists, full stop. Theirs are shaped around how many advanced seats you need and how many words pass through the automation and AI layers. If your bottleneck is people and processing, their shape may suit you; if it is simply a large body of strings, ours will.

Languages, at the entry tier. Adding a target language never changes our price, on any plan. Lokalise caps Explorer at 10 languages and 5 projects; past that you are on Growth at $375. If you expect to pass ten languages, that cap, not the headline price, is the number to plan around.

Where the prices land. Explorer at $144/month sits above our Starter at €65 and below our Premium at €165. At the top of our published range, €332/month, we are roughly a third of Advanced. Which is better value depends entirely on which dimension you are actually growing along.

If you are weighing the three pricing models in this category rather than these two products, why translation software charges per word sets out where per-word, per-seat and per-segment each genuinely fit — including the shapes of product where ours is the wrong one.

Where Lokalise is genuinely better#

Design integration. The Figma workflow is the standout: designers pull real copy into mockups and see how a German string affects a layout before any code exists. That catches text expansion problems at the cheapest possible moment. We have nothing equivalent, and for a design-led team this alone can settle the decision.

Polish. The interface is genuinely well made. For a team with many occasional users, that lowers the support burden in a way that is hard to quantify and easy to feel.

Automation and workflow depth on the higher tiers — rules, triggers, orchestration across multiple products.

Integration breadth, particularly across design and product tooling.

If your localization work starts in design, Lokalise is likely the right tool.

Where WebTranslateIt fits better#

Cost when content grows rather than headcount. A product with a lot of strings and a small team is the shape our pricing suits.

No seat management. Unlimited projects on every plan, unlimited users on Enterprise. No decision about whether an occasional reviewer justifies a seat — and the cost of a translator locked out is usually larger than the seat would have been.

Simplicity. A smaller surface, less to configure, less to learn. A real trade: less depth, less overhead.

Independence and longevity. Independently owned and running since 2008, with no acquisition history and no post-funding pricing restructure. For infrastructure in your build pipeline, predictability is worth something.

Data sovereignty#

Here the difference is real and verifiable, which is not true of every pairing in this category.

Lokalise, Inc. is a Delaware corporation. Their terms state it directly, and specify that the agreement is “governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware”, with disputes brought “exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware”. Despite the company’s European origins, the entity you contract with is American and the governing law is American.

WebTranslateIt Software S.L. is incorporated in Spain, hosting on Hetzner infrastructure independently audited to ISO 27001 and ISO 9001.

On hosting region, credit where it is due: Lokalise is EU-only. Their security documentation states that they process and store customer data on AWS “in EU regions” and that they do “not process or store customer data in non-EU regions”. If your requirement is that content stays in Europe, they meet it and we would be misleading you to suggest otherwise.

But region is the layer that settles least, and an EU-only data policy is doing more persuading here than deciding. An EU region is not an EU jurisdiction, because US law reaches the provider rather than the location:

A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall comply with the obligations of this chapter to preserve, backup, or disclose the contents of a wire or electronic communication and any record or other information pertaining to a customer or subscriber within such provider’s possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.

— 18 U.S.C. § 2713, as amended by the CLOUD Act

That last clause puts AWS Ireland and AWS Virginia under the same reach. With Lokalise the exposure therefore stacks at both layers that matter: a Delaware contracting entity under Delaware law, and Amazon operating the machines. Keeping every byte in an EU region changes neither of those, which is why the EU-only commitment — real and worth stating — answers a narrower question than it appears to.

Two fairness points, because this argument is easy to push too far. It is not a claim that AWS is insecure; it is excellent, heavily audited infrastructure and the question is jurisdiction, not competence. And it is not a claim that the arrangement is unlawful: transfers to US providers are covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework adequacy decision, in force since July 2023 and still standing, with an appeal pending before the Court of Justice as of September 2026. Adequacy governs whether you may send the data, not who may later compel it.

Across the category: Crowdin (Estonian) and Phrase (Czech and German entities) are EU-incorporated, so they clear the contracting layer even though they run on AWS. POEditor is the mirror image — genuinely European servers, but operated by a US corporation, so it clears the infrastructure layer and fails the contracting one. We are incorporated in Spain and run on Hetzner, a German provider, so no US-controlled entity appears at either layer.

Three questions for any vendor: who you contract with, who operates the infrastructure, which sub-processors touch the content. Region is the one people ask first and the one that decides least.

Comparison#

How to decide#

Does your localization work start in design? If designers need real copy in mockups, Lokalise’s Figma integration is a genuine capability gap in their favour, and it is worth choosing on.

Are you growing headcount or content? Seat-based pricing punishes the first; segment-based pricing punishes the second. Project two years out.

Is EU sovereignty a requirement? If so, resolve it before comparing anything else.

Test with your real files. How each platform round-trips your placeholders and plural forms is what you will live with daily, and only your actual files show it. Both offer trials.

Check the exit. TMX export, terminology export, translations in original formats. Ask before you commit.

Migrating, if you decide to#

The mechanics are the same in either direction, and the order matters.

Translation memory first, exported as TMX. It is the asset you have built up over years and the one most often left behind in a migration. On WebTranslateIt you import it by creating a project, setting up the language pairs, uploading the TMX, then pointing your working project’s translation resources at it. Do it before starting real work — a memory imported six months in has missed the six months it would have accelerated.

Term base next, as CSV or a spreadsheet upload. Quick, and it carries the terminology decisions that would otherwise be reconstructed from scratch.

Then the translated files themselves, in their original formats — the .json, .yml, .strings or .xml your build already consumes rather than an intermediate export. Done that way the switch is invisible to the application.

Run both in parallel for one release cycle. Push to both, translate a small batch in the new tool, pull from both, and diff. Round-tripping differences show up here — a dropped comment, a reordered plural form, a changed encoding — while backing out is still cheap.

Budget a day for the mechanics. Retraining translators takes longer, which argues for moving between releases rather than mid-sprint.

The short version#

Lokalise is more polished, integrates with design tooling in a way we do not, and prices on seats.

WebTranslateIt is simpler, prices on source segments so languages and people are free, is hosted and owned in the EU, and has been independently run since 2008.

If design-led localization is central to how you work, take Lokalise. If you want translation to be a reliable, predictable part of your build pipeline, we are the better shape.