Best App Localization Providers (2026): 7 Apps Worth Downloading

Quick comparison

The best app localization providers

#1

Crowdin

Best for: Indie developers and small app teams that want a real free plan and the cheapest honest entry price

★★★★★★★★★★4.4/5 on G2 (760 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit crowdin.com

Starting price$59/month (Pro, billed monthly; $50/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free plan (60,000 hosted words, 1 private project)

Crowdin is the friendliest way to start localizing an app: the free plan covers 60,000 hosted words and one private project, so a small app can ship in several languages before paying anything. Pro costs $59 a month, or $50 billed annually, and adds a second private project plus a second integration. Translators are unlimited on every plan, and GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket integrations keep strings in sync with releases.

The catch is the word meter. Hosted words are source words multiplied by target languages, so a 10,000-word app in five languages already uses 50,000 of Pro's 60,000-word allowance. The in-context editor waits for Team at $150 a month, and free-plan translations feed Crowdin's shared translation memory. Pick Crowdin when the app is small and the budget is smaller.

What we like

• Free plan covers 60,000 hosted words and 1 private project — the most usable free tier here
• Unlimited translator seats on every plan, including free, so the team size never changes the price
• GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket integrations plus over-the-air delivery push translations straight to the app
• Crowdin AI pre-translation is included, so new strings arrive already drafted for review

Watch out for

• Hosted words multiply by language count, so a 10,000-word app in 5 languages already uses 50,000 of the 60,000-word Pro allowance
• The in-context editor and custom QA checks wait for Team at $150/month billed annually
• Free-plan translations feed Crowdin's shared translation memory, per its pricing-page terms

#2

Lokalise

Best for: Product teams that ship mobile and web apps fast and want automation from day one

★★★★★★★★★★4.7/5 on G2 (765 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit lokalise.com

Starting price$169/month (Explorer, billed monthly; $149/month billed annually)

Free planNo — 14-day free trial

Lokalise is the speed pick: connect the repository, and new strings flow to translators as the team ships, with machine translation drafting them first. Explorer costs $169 a month, or $149 billed annually, and covers 5 projects and 10 languages with unlimited hosted words and unlimited translator seats. Over-the-air SDKs push corrected copy to iOS and Android apps without waiting for a store review.

The trade-off is the ladder. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial, and two-factor authentication, branching and style guides all wait for Advanced at $999 a month. Explorer's processed-word allowance also caps how much new and changed text the AI can handle each year. Pick Lokalise when the team ships weekly and localization must keep up.

What we like

• Unlimited hosted words and unlimited translator and reviewer seats on every paid plan
• Strong GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Figma integrations keep strings in sync with releases
• Over-the-air SDKs for iOS and Android update in-app copy without a new store release
• 24/7 support on every plan, including the entry Explorer tier

Watch out for

• No free plan — only a 14-day trial, and the free tier exists only for approved open-source projects
• Two-factor authentication, branching and style guides wait for Advanced from $999/month billed annually
• Processed-word caps push a growing app up a tier faster than the headline price suggests

#3

POEditor

Best for: Indie developers and small teams that want the cheapest string-based plan without seat pricing

★★★★★★★★★★4.5/5 on G2 (93 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit poeditor.com

Starting price$20/month (Start, billed monthly; $17/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free plan (1,000 strings, unlimited projects)

POEditor is the simple, cheap pick: a string manager with an API, Git integrations and unlimited contributors, priced by how many strings you hold rather than by seats. Start costs $20 a month, or $17 billed annually, for 3,000 strings, and the free plan covers 1,000 strings across unlimited projects. For a small app with a few hundred keys, that is the lowest honest bill in this list.

The limit is the string count. POEditor counts strings as terms plus translations, so 500 keys in five languages is already 3,000 strings and the Start plan is full. Webhooks and custom workflows wait for Premium at $136 a month, and there is no in-context editor. Pick POEditor when the app is small and the workflow is simple.

What we like

• Cheapest paid entry here: Start is $17/month billed annually for 3,000 strings
• Unlimited contributors on every plan, so translators and reviewers never add to the bill
• Simple API and Git service integrations cover the standard app workflow without enterprise setup
• Free plan covers 1,000 strings with unlimited projects, enough to test a real app

Watch out for

• Strings are counted as terms plus translations, so each new language multiplies the count and 3,000 strings goes fast
• Webhooks and custom workflows wait for Premium at $136/month billed annually
• Workflow features are thinner than Lokalise or Crowdin, with no built-in in-context editor

#4

Localazy

Best for: Mobile-first teams that want key-based pricing that stays flat as languages grow

★★★★★★★★★★4.8/5 on G2 (78 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit localazy.com

Starting price$41/month (Professional, billed monthly; $34/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free plan (200 source keys, unlimited seats and languages)

Localazy prices by source keys, not words, so the bill stays flat when you add a language — the one pricing model in this list that rewards going wide. Professional costs $41 a month, or $34 billed annually, for 1,000 source keys with 12,000 AI-translation words, and every plan includes unlimited seats, projects and languages. The CLI and CI/CD tooling are built for Android, iOS and Flutter.

The free plan is small at 200 source keys, so a real app needs Professional almost immediately, and integrations and automations wait for Autopilot at $78 a month. The 2,500-key Professional tier costs $61 a month billed annually, so a growing key count still moves the price. Pick Localazy when the app will ship in ten languages, not three.

What we like

• Key-based pricing: adding a language costs nothing extra, unlike word-metered rivals
• CLI and CI/CD tooling built for mobile, with Android, iOS and Flutter support
• Highest G2 score in this list at 4.8/5, with reviewers praising ease of use
• Unlimited seats, projects and languages on every plan, including free

Watch out for

• Free plan covers only 200 source keys, so a real app outgrows it in the first week
• Integrations and automations wait for Autopilot at $78/month billed annually
• Smallest review base here — 78 G2 reviews — so long-term reliability is less proven

#5

Phrase

Best for: Enterprises running software strings and long-form content in one suite

★★★★★★★★★★4.5/5 on G2 (1,354 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit phrase.com

Starting price$27/month (Freelancer, billed annually; app teams need Software UI/UX from $525/month)

Free planNo — 14-day free trial

Phrase is what Memsource became, and the combined company now covers both sides of localization: short UI strings through Phrase Strings and long documents through Phrase TMS, sharing one translation memory. The Freelancer plan starts at $27 a month billed annually, which is the cheapest headline price here — but it buys one TMS seat and no Strings seats at all.

Real app work starts at Software UI/UX, $525 a month billed annually, with 15 Strings seats and 1 million managed words, and Team runs $1,245 a month. The suite earns its price when one team localizes both the app and its help center, marketing site and legal documents. Pick Phrase when the app is one product line among many.

What we like

• One suite for app strings (Phrase Strings) and documents (Phrase TMS), with shared translation memory
• Language AI routes each language through the best engine, including DeepL and custom engines
• Largest review base here at 1,354 G2 reviews, with a 4.5/5 score
• 14-day free trial on every plan, with 24/7 support included

Watch out for

• The $27 Freelancer plan has no Strings seats — real app work starts at Software UI/UX, $525/month billed annually
• Three separate plan families (Freelancer, Developer, Business) make the pricing page hard to read
• Business and Enterprise plans are quote-only, so large teams cannot see the full price upfront

#6

Transifex

Best for: Teams that want continuous localization wired into CI/CD from the start

★★★★★★★★★★4.3/5 on G2 (726 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit transifex.com

Starting price$160/month (Starter, billed monthly; $135/month billed annually)

Free planNo — 14-day free trial (Growth plan)

Transifex is the continuous-localization pick: strings move from the repository to translators and back without manual exports, so a release never waits on translation. Starter costs $160 a month, or $135 billed annually, for 50,000 hosted words, 10 collaborators and unlimited projects and files. Native SDKs cover iOS, Android, React and Django, and 46-plus integrations wire it into the rest of the stack.

The catches are the missing pieces on Starter. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial on Growth, and AI translation is a separate add-on from $84 a month rather than part of the subscription. Growth starts at $200 a month billed annually. Pick Transifex when localization runs on every commit, not once a quarter.

What we like

• Built for continuous localization, with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and 46+ other integrations
• Unlimited projects and files on every plan, so side projects cost nothing extra
• Strong translation memory and QA checks keep terminology consistent across releases
• Native SDKs for iOS, Android, React and Django fit the app stack directly

Watch out for

• No free plan — only a 14-day trial on the Growth plan
• AI translation is a paid add-on from $84/month, not included on Starter
• Hosted-word tiers push the price up as content grows, and renewals can rise to the then-current list price

#7

Smartling

Best for: Enterprises shipping high volumes that want AI plus human translation in one platform

★★★★★★★★★★4.4/5 on G2 (713 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit smartling.com

Starting priceCustom quote (Enterprise); machine translation from $0.0075/word, free Core plan

Free planYes — free Core plan

Smartling is the enterprise pick, and the only tool here with no monthly subscription at all: a free Core plan, published per-word rates, and a custom Enterprise quote. Machine translation starts at $0.0075 a word, AI translation at $0.06, and professional human translation at $0.20. The platform pairs that with 50-plus integrations, 4,000-plus professional linguists and MQM-based quality scoring on every translation.

The per-word model is the risk. A 50,000-word release machine-translated once costs $375 before any platform fee, and a human-translated release costs $10,000 at the $0.20 rate — so volume, not the headline rate, decides the bill. The free Core plan also keeps translation memory only 180 days. Pick Smartling when volume is high and quality must be measured.

What we like

• Free Core plan includes the real platform — TMS, AI translation and connectors — not a demo
• Published per-word rates: machine translation from $0.0075/word, AI from $0.06, human from $0.20
• 50+ integrations and 4,000+ professional linguists cover app, web and marketing content
• MQM-based quality scoring gives every translation a measurable quality grade

Watch out for

• No published monthly price — Enterprise is quote-only, so small teams cannot budget it upfront
• Per-word billing can surprise at volume: a big release costs more than a flat subscription
• Free Core plan keeps translation memory only 180 days, so the reuse savings reset if you wait to upgrade

The best app localization providers turn one language of app strings into ten without turning releases into a translation project. The seven tools below are ranked by fit for the most common buyer — a small app team shipping an iOS or Android app in several languages — and every price was verified on November 4, 2026.

Most of these tools charge by a meter that multiplies as languages grow — hosted words, source keys or strings — so the headline price is rarely the whole bill. The cards below show the real starting price for each tool, what the free plan actually covers, and where the extra charges hide.

How to choose the best app localization providers

• Count the meter that matters. Crowdin and Transifex charge hosted words (source words times languages), POEditor counts strings (terms plus translations), and Localazy counts source keys only. A $20 plan can cost more than a $59 plan once the fifth language is added.
• Check the free plan's real limits. Crowdin's free plan covers 60,000 hosted words; POEditor's covers 1,000 strings; Localazy's covers 200 keys. Lokalise, Phrase and Transifex have no free plan at all.
• Price the AI separately. Machine translation is included on most entry plans here, but Transifex sells AI words as an add-on from $84 a month, and Smartling bills every word.
• Match the tool to the release cycle. Teams that ship weekly need continuous localization with repo sync and over-the-air updates; teams that ship quarterly can live with manual file uploads.
• Test the file formats first. Export one real screen of strings — JSON, strings, XML or ARB — and import it into the trial. A tool that mangles placeholders or plurals costs more in fixes than any subscription saves.

An app that is found in more languages also needs to be found in search. If the app has a website or landing page, our AI search optimization service handles the visibility side, and the free hreflang tag generator builds the language tags every multilingual site needs. Before you publish new pages for the markets you enter, run your titles through the free SERP snippet preview tool — it shows exactly how the title and description will look in Google.

Whatever you shortlist, try it with real strings before you pay. The free plans and trials in this list are long enough to run one genuine release — your keys, your languages, your translators — and that release tells you more than any review can. Check two things in the trial: that the GitHub sync pulls new strings without a manual export, and that the machine translation quality holds up in your least-spoken language.

App localization pricing: what you will actually pay

Take an app with 2,000 strings — about 10,000 source words — shipping in 5 languages. On monthly billing, the subscription costs $20 on POEditor Start (too small at 3,000 strings, so the real pick is Plus at $60), $59 on Crowdin Pro, $73 on Localazy Professional at the 2,500-key tier, $160 on Transifex Starter, $169 on Lokalise Explorer and $525 on Phrase Software UI/UX. Smartling has no subscription: one machine-translated pass of the 50,000 words costs $375 at $0.0075 a word, before any platform fee.

Over a year on annual billing, that same app pays $600 on Crowdin Pro, $612 on POEditor Plus, $732 on Localazy Professional, $1,620 on Transifex Starter, $1,788 on Lokalise Explorer and $6,300 on Phrase Software UI/UX. The same 2,000 strings and the same 5 languages cost $600 a year at the cheap end and $6,300 at the dear end — and the gap comes from the meter and the plan tier, not from features.

Three costs sit outside every number above. First, the AI and machine-translation meter: Transifex AI words start at $84 a month on top of Starter, and Smartling bills every word at $0.0075 to $0.20 depending on the tier. Second, the monthly-billing premium: paying monthly instead of annually costs 12–18% more on most tools here — Lokalise jumps from $149 to $169, Crowdin from $50 to $59. Third, the add-ons that feel mandatory once you are set up: extra hosted words or keys, a second integration, and human review of machine-translated strings. If the app also needs its store listing translated, that is a separate job — see our guide to localization companies for the service side.

Know the difference: a translation platform vs a translation service

The confusion in this category is between a tool and a service. A translation platform — every tool in this list — is software that manages strings, translators and releases; it does not translate anything by itself unless you switch on machine translation or hire translators through it. A translation service — an agency like the ones in our localization companies guide — is people who do the translating for you, usually charging per word.

That split is why the prices look inconsistent. Smartling sells both: a platform with a free Core plan plus per-word translation services from $0.0075 a word, so the platform can be free while the translation costs thousands. Crowdin, Lokalise and the rest sell the platform, and the translation itself is either machine translation included in the plan or human translators you bring yourself.

A third distinction worth knowing is machine translation versus AI translation. Machine translation — Google Translate, DeepL — converts text with a trained model and is cheap and fast. AI translation, as Phrase and Smartling sell it, adds large language models, brand glossaries and quality scoring on top, and costs more per word. Both still need a human review for anything the user sees on a payment screen or a medical warning. Judge each tool on both halves: what the platform costs, and what the translation costs at your volume.

Quick comparison: tool type by need

Mistakes to avoid

• Budgeting on the headline price without the meter. A $20 POEditor plan covers 3,000 strings, but 500 keys in five languages is already 3,000 strings. Crowdin Pro covers 60,000 hosted words, but a 10,000-word app in five languages uses 50,000. Model the price at your real language count.
• Buying Phrase on the $27 headline. Freelancer at $27 a month buys one TMS seat and no Strings seats at all — it cannot localize an app. App work starts at Software UI/UX, $525 a month billed annually. The headline is real, but it is not the price of app localization.
• Forgetting the AI meter. Transifex AI words start at $84 a month on top of Starter, and Smartling bills every word from $0.0075 to $0.20. A month with a big release adds hundreds before a human translator is paid.
• Ignoring the free plan's real size. Localazy's free plan covers 200 source keys and POEditor's covers 1,000 strings — both run out during the first real release. Only Crowdin's free plan, at 60,000 hosted words, survives a small production app.
• Picking a platform that cannot see your code. A tool with no GitHub sync is a second inbox for strings. If the team ships from a repository, the platform that pulls new strings automatically is worth more than the cheapest standalone price.

How we chose

We checked each vendor's own pricing page on November 4, 2026 and recorded the starting price exactly as shown, including the annual-billing figure where the page lists one, and we ranked the tools by fit for the most common buyer — a small app team localizing an iOS or Android app — not by brand size. Two prices needed a workaround: the browser reader returned a rate-limit error on the day, so Crowdin, Phrase, POEditor, Localazy and Transifex prices were verified against the vendors' own pricing pages through search-engine copies of those pages dated within the last few days, cross-checked across several independent sources quoting the same pages; Lokalise was verified directly from the live pricing page's own price data ($149 annual, $169 monthly). Smartling's per-word rates come from its own plans page, as quoted on smartling.com. Ratings come from G2 pages checked November 4, 2026; Phrase's rating is for its Phrase product listing, the one that carries its localization platform reviews. No vendor paid for a place in this list, and none of the links here are affiliate links.

What to do next

Start with the free plan or trial of your top pick and run one real release through it. Check that the repository sync pulls new strings without a manual export, that the machine translation quality holds up in your least-spoken language, and that the bill at your real language count matches the quote before you commit to a year. If the app is sorted but new users are not finding it, our AI search optimization service handles the visibility side — or compare the service side in our guide to localization companies. Once your tools are in place, find out what's holding your rankings back.

Sources we checked (14)

• Lokalise pricing — lokalise.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• Crowdin pricing — crowdin.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• POEditor pricing — poeditor.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• Localazy pricing — localazy.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• Phrase pricing — phrase.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• Transifex pricing — transifex.com/pricing (checked November 4, 2026)
• Smartling plans — smartling.com/plans (checked November 4, 2026)
• Lokalise on G2 — g2.com/products/lokalise/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• Crowdin on G2 — g2.com/products/crowdin/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• POEditor on G2 — g2.com/products/poeditor/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• Localazy on G2 — g2.com/products/localazy/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• Phrase on G2 — g2.com/products/phrase-phrase/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• Transifex on G2 — g2.com/products/transifex/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)
• Smartling on G2 — g2.com/products/smartling/reviews (checked November 4, 2026)