Crowdin vs Lokalise

Crowdin and Lokalise are two of the most compared translation management systems. Both are mature, both are well-funded, and both are used by thousands of teams. But they optimize for different things — and the right choice depends on your team structure, budget, and workflow.

Here's a side-by-side comparison, including where each excels, where each falls short, and when you might want a different approach entirely.

This is where the two platforms diverge most significantly.

Crowdin

• →Free: 1 private project, 60K hosted words
• →Pro: $59/month
• →Team: $179/month
• →Team+: $450/month
• →Business / Enterprise: Custom pricing — SSO, audit logs, dedicated support

Crowdin's pricing scales with hosted word count, not seats. For teams with many small projects, this is often the cheaper option.

Lokalise

• →Explorer: $149/month
• →Growth: $379/month
• →Advanced: $1,049/month
• →Enterprise: Demo-only — SSO, audit logs

Lokalise has no free plan; you can start with a 14-day trial. Plans start at $149/month. Check Lokalise pricing for each plan's current allowances.

Price comparison for a typical team

Ecosystem breadth

Crowdin has been around since 2009 and has a large integration ecosystem — 700+ integrations spanning content platforms, development tools, design tools, and marketing systems. It also ships a CLI and an official VS Code extension. If you need to connect your TMS to something obscure, Crowdin probably supports it.

Vendor management

Crowdin's translator marketplace lets you find, hire, and manage professional translators directly from the platform. You can get quotes, assign tasks, track progress, and pay translators without leaving Crowdin. It's one of Crowdin's strongest features.

Price-to-feature ratio

At $59/month for the Pro plan, Crowdin gives you a lot for the price: unlimited languages, AI and machine translation, OTA delivery, and a full API.

Over-the-air delivery

Both platforms offer OTA delivery with mobile SDKs across iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. Compare the SDK for your platform before you choose.

Visual context

Lokalise's screenshot feature is excellent. Upload screenshots of your app, link them to translation keys, and translators see exactly where each string appears. For teams working with external translators, this improves translation quality and reduces back-and-forth.

In-context editing

Lokalise's web editor shows strings in a simulated version of your app. Translators can see the surrounding UI, adjust translations based on available space, and preview changes in real time. Crowdin has in-context tools too; try both with your translators.

Git branching

Lokalise supports translation branches that mirror your git branches. When your development team works on feature branches, translators can work on corresponding translation branches without conflicts. Crowdin supports branching too, with a different model.

Interface

Many teams find Lokalise's interface more modern and easier to learn. If your team spends hours in the TMS dashboard, try both and see which one your translators prefer.

No hardcoded-string detection

Neither platform is built to find hardcoded strings in your source code. They manage strings you've already extracted into translation files. Finding hardcoded strings in a 200-component Next.js app and wrapping them in a translation function is work you do yourself with both tools — and it comes back whenever new features ship.

Dashboard-first design

Both platforms have CLIs and APIs, but the core workflow lives in a web browser. For developer-led teams, that can mean switching between your editor and a browser tab.

Pricing for small teams

For a 2-3 person startup, the jump from free to paid can feel steep. Crowdin's free tier is 1 project, and Lokalise has no free plan. The moment you need more than Crowdin's free tier — or anything at all from Lokalise — you're paying $59-149+/month for translation management.

If you're a developer-led team and the comparison above doesn't quite fit, you might want a different category of tool. Polyglot is a CLI-first tool that starts in your source code: it finds hardcoded strings with AST parsing, translates them with fine-tuned LLMs, and previews locally. Scan, plan, wrap and preview run on your machine; generated translations are reviewed in the Polyglot dashboard (automatic approval is off). Its translation quality scored 4.96/5 across 49 languages on our June 2026 pipeline, AI-judged — reproducible benchmark.

Polyglot also ships a VS Code extension that flags untranslated strings inline as you code and an open GitHub Action that catches new untranslated strings on every PR. On Team and Scale, Polyglot Automation (early access) adds managed checks and catalog sync, and its Publisher opens a separate catalog-only PR after human review — your team merges it.

Detection covers Next.js, Astro, SvelteKit, Vue, Angular, React Native and Flutter; runtime support varies by setup, and Next.js App Router with next-intl is the best-tested path. Polyglot isn't a TMS replacement if you need vendor management, professional translator workflows, or OTA delivery. But for developer-led teams who want to find, wrap, translate, and preview strings starting from their code, it's a different approach at a lower price point.

Choose Crowdin if:

• →You work with professional translators or agencies
• →You need a broad ecosystem of integrations
• →You want a feature-rich TMS at a lower entry price
• →You need OTA delivery for mobile apps

Choose Lokalise if:

• →Visual context (screenshots) for translators is a priority
• →You need advanced in-context editing
• →Git branching for translations is important to your workflow
• →You value a modern, polished dashboard experience

Choose Polyglot if:

• →Your team is developer-led (no dedicated localization team)
• →You need to find hardcoded strings, not just manage extracted ones
• →You prefer starting from the CLI and your editor over a dashboard
• →You want to start free and see your first localized screen before you pay