Comparison
A Lokalise alternative for people who ship files, not workflows
Lokalise is a translation management system built around a team. If your team is you and a build pipeline, most of what you pay for there is the part you never open.
- Lokalise, entry plan
- $144
- ShipGlobal
- €19
Explorer. Billed per seat. The price is the same whether the team ships a release this month or not.
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 people look for one
The Explorer plan is $144 a month and it is billed per seat, which means it costs the same in the month you ship three releases and in the month you ship none. For an agency coordinating fifteen translators that is the right shape. For two developers who push a language file, wait, and pull it back translated, it is a subscription to a collaboration surface nobody logs into. The second reason is the review layer: Lokalise assumes a human translator is in the loop and builds screens for them. If your translations come from a model and your review is a pull request, those screens are cost without a job.
What Lokalise lists
Every plan Lokalise publishes, with the source and the date it was read. Prices change; this table says when it was last checked.
| Plan | Per month |
|---|---|
| Explorer | $144 |
| Growth | $375 |
| Advanced | $999 |
| Enterprise | On request |
The fair part
When Lokalise is the better choice
If translators work inside the tool, Lokalise is the better choice and it is not close. Review chains, task assignment, comment threads on a single key, screenshot context for a translator who cannot see the app, per-language progress that a project manager watches: all of that exists there and none of it exists here. The same goes for the integration list. Lokalise connects to Figma, to a long list of repositories and CMSes, and to translation vendors you can order human work from inside the platform. ShipGlobal reads a file and writes a file. If your localization is a process with people in it, pay for the process.
Getting your files out
Lokalise exports the formats you put in: JSON, .strings, .xcstrings, .arb, XLIFF, PO. Export from the project, run the key diff against your source file to see what actually made it out, and convert if the export format is not the one your build reads.
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
- Is ShipGlobal cheaper than Lokalise?
- For a small team, usually yes, but the comparison depends on what you count. Lokalise Explorer is $144 a month regardless of use. ShipGlobal is €19 per seat and month plus €10 per million tokens, charged only for strings that are new or whose source changed. A quiet month costs €19. A month where you translate a 50,000-character file into five languages costs roughly €19 plus a euro or two of tokens. Where Lokalise wins on cost is the case where you would otherwise buy several seats and use all of them.
- Can I keep my translation memory?
- You can export your existing translations from Lokalise and use them as the starting point. ShipGlobal keeps its translation memory in your project rather than in an account, so a string you have already translated is matched locally and costs nothing to reuse. It also means the memory does not stay behind if you stop paying.
- Does ShipGlobal have a web editor for translators?
- No, and that is a real difference rather than a roadmap item. ShipGlobal produces a translated file. If someone needs to review it in a table, the XLIFF viewer on this site opens a file in the browser and takes it to Excel and back. What it does not have is accounts for translators, assignment, or a review workflow.
- What happens to placeholders and plurals?
- They come back exactly as they went in. %@, %lld, %1$s and named placeholders are preserved, ICU plural forms and .xcstrings variations survive the round trip, and a file that would lose a key is refused rather than downloaded incomplete. This is checked before anything is written, not after.