Comparison
A Crowdin alternative that does not charge per language
Crowdin counts hosted words: your source words multiplied by the number of target languages. Going from five languages to ten doubles that number without a single word of new text.
- Crowdin, entry plan
- Not published
- ShipGlobal
- €19
Billed per hosted word, which is source words multiplied by target languages. The tenth language changes nothing about the text and nearly doubles the number.
Per seat and month, incl. VAT. On top of that €10 per million tokens, and only for strings that are new or changed. Bring your own model key and the token cost disappears.
Why the unit matters more than the price
Crowdin's own pricing page gives the formula: 500 words into 10 languages is 5,000 hosted words. The consequence is that the cost of adding a market is charged against a file you already wrote. A product with a 3,000-word interface pays for 3,000 words at five languages and 6,000 at ten, forever, whether or not anyone touches the text again. The second thing people run into is that the pricing page does not display amounts at all. You pick a plan or use the calculator to see a number, which makes budgeting before a decision harder than it needs to be.
What Crowdin lists
Every plan Crowdin publishes, with the source and the date it was read. Prices change; this table says when it was last checked.
| Plan | Per month |
|---|---|
| Team | On request |
| Business | On request |
| Enterprise | On request |
The fair part
When Crowdin is the better choice
For an open-source project, Crowdin is very hard to beat: it is free for qualifying open-source, it is built for community translators, and the crowd-sourcing model with voting and proofreading is the whole point of the product. Paid plans allow unlimited translators and proofreaders, which is the right shape when your translations come from volunteers rather than a model. Its integration list is also longer than ours by a wide margin, including repositories, CMSes and design tools. If you want a community translating your product, use Crowdin.
Getting your files out
Crowdin exports the formats you uploaded, and its CLI can pull a whole project down. Once the files are local, run the key diff against your source to see what came out, then convert anything your build cannot read directly.
One language file in. 64 languages out.
No seat you forgot to cancel, no allowance that expires, no per-language multiplier. You pay for the strings that changed and nothing else.
€19 per month incl. VAT, cancellable monthly.
Questions
- What is a hosted word?
- Crowdin defines it as the number of words to be translated multiplied by the project's target languages. Their example: 500 words across 10 languages equals 5,000 hosted words. It is the unit the plan limits are expressed in.
- Why can I not see Crowdin's prices?
- The public pricing page does not print amounts. It explains the hosted-word formula, offers a price calculator, and shows plan names, but you select a plan or run the calculator to get a figure. That is a statement about the page as it stood in August 2026, not a criticism of the product.
- Does ShipGlobal charge more for more languages?
- Only for the tokens it actually spends. Translating the same source into ten languages costs roughly twice the tokens of translating it into five, because twice as much text is produced. What does not happen is a recurring monthly multiplier: once a string is translated it sits in the translation memory and the eleventh release costs nothing for it.
- Can I use ShipGlobal for an open-source project?
- You can, but be honest about the fit. If you want volunteers translating and voting on each other's work, that is Crowdin's model and ours does not replace it. If you just want the interface to exist in 64 languages without asking anyone, that is what ShipGlobal does.