WebTranslateIt vs Tolgee

This is the comparison in our cluster where the usual argument does not apply, and saying so plainly is more useful than pretending otherwise. Tolgee counts a key once regardless of how many languages you translate it into — the same principle as our source segments. If you arrived here expecting to find that they multiply your bill by your language count, they do not.

What differs is the other axis. Tolgee meters seats; we do not. That, plus the fact that Tolgee’s core is Apache-licensed and can be run on your own servers while we are hosted-only, is the whole of the comparison.

Pricing and features below were checked on 11 September 2026 against tolgee.io/pricing and our own pricing page. Both products change; verify before deciding.

Where we agree, and it matters#

Most of this cluster is an argument about billable units, because most platforms in the category multiply by target language: Crowdin and Transifex meter words times languages, and POEditor’s “strings” are terms plus translations. Tolgee does none of that. Their pricing FAQ is explicit:

A key is the unique identifier of one text element in your product, counted once—no matter how many languages you translate it into.

That is our position too. A segment here is one string in your source file, and translations are never counted. So the twentieth language is free on both platforms, and anyone choosing between us should ignore the language-count arithmetic entirely and look at the two things that genuinely differ.

The first difference: seats#

Tolgee’s plans bundle keys and seats together, and the seats are the expensive half.

Beyond those allowances everything is pay-as-you-go, and the two rates are strikingly different:

Keys are cheap and seats are not. A thousand more strings costs €5 a month on every tier; one more person costs between €8 and €22. That ratio is the entire shape of their pricing, and it means the cheapest route through Tolgee is usually the Team plan topped up with pay-as-you-go keys rather than a jump to Business or Advanced.

WebTranslateIt, billed annually: €65/month for 5,000 segments, €165 for 10,000, €332 for 50,000. Monthly billing is €79, €199 and €399. Users are included — 10, 50 and unlimited respectively — and never priced separately.

What that does to the bill#

Take a product with 5,000 source segments and vary only the number of people who need access. On our side that is Starter at €780 a year up to ten users, then Premium at €1,980 up to fifty. On Tolgee’s it is the Team plan at €49 a month, plus €15 for the three thousand extra keys, plus €8 for every seat past the fourth.

At four seats it is a tie, and below that Tolgee is cheaper. The lines cross somewhere between the fifth and the thirteenth seat depending on how many keys you hold — at 2,000 keys the crossover is about six seats, at 5,000 about five, and at 10,000 about thirteen, because our Premium tier buys you fifty users at once while theirs are still charged one at a time.

The second difference: you can run Tolgee yourself#

This is a genuine capability we do not have at any price, and it is worth more than a line in a feature grid. It is also more qualified than the word “open-source” on their homepage suggests, so both halves are worth stating.

What is genuinely open. The Tolgee platform repository is dual-licensed. Everything outside the ee/ and webapp/src/ee directories is Apache 2.0 — a real open source licence, with no restriction on commercial use. Their LICENSE file sets it out directly:

Tolgee monorepo uses multiple licenses. Portions of this software are licensed as follows: All content that resides under the “ee/” and “/webapp/src/ee” directory of this repository, is licensed under the license defined in “ee/LICENSE”. Content outside of the above mentioned directories or restrictions defaults to the “Apache License 2.0” license.

You can delete those two directories and run the community version under Apache 2.0, which their own documentation describes as the intended route.

What is not. The ee/ directories are under the Tolgee EE License, which is source-available rather than open source: non-commercial use only, no offering the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, and no disabling the licence-key mechanism. And free self-hosting is capped — their documentation states it includes core features and up to 10 seats, with SSO and granular permissions requiring a paid licence.

So the accurate version is: Apache-licensed core you can read, fork and run commercially; a source-available enterprise layer you cannot; and a free self-hosted deployment that stops at ten people. That still leaves three things we cannot match:

You can run it inside your own network. If your security policy, your regulator or your customers require that translation content never leaves infrastructure you control, that requirement is not negotiable and we do not meet it. Tolgee does.

You can read the code. Behaviour you are unsure about can be checked rather than asked about, and a bug you care about can be fixed rather than filed.

You have an exit that does not depend on the vendor. A hosted-only supplier going away is a migration; an Apache-licensed codebase going away is a fork.

We would rather state that plainly than bury it. If self-hosting is on your requirements list, stop comparing here and take Tolgee — just budget for the licensed tier if you need more than ten seats or SSO.

Where Tolgee is genuinely better#

Beyond self-hosting and the small-team price, several things are theirs rather than ours:

In-context translating. Editing strings inside your running application, rather than in a table alongside a screenshot. Their SDKs make this the centre of the product, and it is a different experience from what we offer.

A Figma plugin. If localization work starts in design, that is a real gap on our side — the same one we acknowledge against Lokalise.

An MCP server, included from the free plan. We have no equivalent, so an AI agent driving your localization is something they support and we do not.

Branching. Translation branches that mirror your Git branches, on their Advanced plan.

ISO 27001. They publish certification; we rely on our hosting provider’s.

A genuinely free plan with the full feature set — 500 keys, 3 seats, all integrations, no card.

Where WebTranslateIt fits better#

People are free. The core of it. Ten users on the entry plan, fifty on Premium, unlimited on Enterprise, with no arithmetic about who really needs access.

Published capacity at the top end. Our Enterprise plan is 50,000 segments with unlimited users at a price on the page. Above 20,000 keys Tolgee moves to pay-as-you-go or a conversation.

File format breadth. We parse 80+ formats. Tolgee is developer-first and covers the common ones well; if your awkward file is a .resx, a .strings or something older, check it against both.

Longevity. Running since 2008, independently owned, with no acquisition roadmap and no history of pricing being restructured after an investment round.

It is somebody’s job. A hosted service where the company that wrote the software also runs it. For a team with no appetite to operate another system, that is the feature.

Data sovereignty#

Here the result is the opposite way round from the licensing, and it is worth checking rather than inferring from where the company is.

Tolgee s.r.o. is a Czech company, registered office Letovická 1421/22, Brno, ID number 09968326. Their terms are governed by Czech law with exclusive jurisdiction in Czech courts. WebTranslateIt Software S.L. is incorporated in Spain. Both of us clear the contracting layer, and neither has a US entity in that chain.

The infrastructure layer separates us. Their information security policy states it plainly:

We host the Tolgee SaaS on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. Azure provides our core compute and databases, while AWS is used for object storage and sending transactional emails.

Public DNS agrees — app.tolgee.io resolves into Microsoft’s address space, in an Azure region in Germany. The same policy commits to storing data in EU data centres “whenever feasible”, while noting that both providers “operate data centres in the EU and US”; their older privacy policy states that “our servers are located in Germany, Czech Republic, and United States”. Those documents are not perfectly consistent, which is itself a thing to raise with them if this matters to you.

An EU region on a US-operated cloud 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

So Tolgee sits where Crowdin and Phrase sit: an EU company with a US-controlled entity operating the machines. We run on Hetzner, a German provider independently audited to ISO 27001 and ISO 9001, so no US-controlled entity appears at either layer.

Two fairness points. This is not a claim that Azure is insecure — it is excellent, heavily certified infrastructure, and the question is jurisdiction rather than competence. And it is not a claim the arrangement is unlawful: transfers to US providers are covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework adequacy decision, in force since July 2023, with an appeal pending before the Court of Justice as of September 2026. Adequacy governs whether you may send data, not who may later compel it.

And there is a route around all of this that only they offer. If sovereignty is your binding requirement, self-hosting Tolgee removes the question entirely — the software runs wherever you put it. That is a better answer than either of our hosted products, and it is theirs.

Tolgee also states ISO 27001 certification at the vendor level, where we rely on our hosting provider’s audits. Neither of us publishes a certificate number, so treat both as claims to verify during procurement.

Feature comparison#

Feature grids flatter whoever writes them. Read this one for the rows where the other column wins, because there are more of them here than anywhere else in this cluster.

How to actually decide#

Count the seats, not the languages. Neither platform charges for languages, so the question is how many people need access. Under about five, Tolgee is cheaper. Past the crossover for your key count — roughly six seats at 2,000 keys, five at 5,000, thirteen at 10,000 — we are. In between, run the arithmetic above with your own numbers rather than ours.

Decide the self-hosting question first. It is binary, and it eliminates one of us immediately. If you need it, we are not a candidate.

Test with your real files. Not a sample — your actual language files, including the awkward format. How each platform round-trips your placeholders and plural forms is what you live with daily. Both offer free trials.

Check the export path before you commit. Translation memory as TMX, terminology, translations in their original formats. This applies to us as much as to anyone.

The short version#

Tolgee has an Apache-licensed core you can self-host, is developer-first, and prices keys the same way we price segments — so on the question that separates most of this category, we are on the same side.

The difference is seats. Theirs cost €8 to €22 a month each; ours are included, ten on the entry plan and fifty on the next. A small team is cheaper on Tolgee and a wide one is cheaper here, with the lines crossing somewhere around five seats.

Choose Tolgee if you need to self-host, want a codebase you can read, or have a small team. Choose us if translation involves more than a handful of people and you would rather not price each of them.

One thing worth separating from both: Tolgee is a Czech company, so it clears the contracting layer that Transifex, Lokalise and POEditor do not — but its hosted product runs on Azure and AWS, so it does not clear the infrastructure one. Self-hosting is the answer they have and we do not.