Smartcat vs Crowdin AI platform comparison 2024

Looking for the best AI translation platforms? If you're comparing Crowdin vs Smartcat then you're on a good path when choosing professional localizatio n software for your enterprise.

This article will compare the two and show you why the Smartcat translation platform h as the edge, particularly regarding marketing localization and eLearning translations.

Smartcat and Crowdin are leading platforms that incorporate translation management software (TMS) solutions designed to streamline localization for businesses. These platforms offer a comprehensive suite of tools, including project tracking, collaboration features, and automated translation, to help manage and optimize translation workflows.

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, Smartcat and Crowdin cater to your needs by supporting various content types such as apps, websites, games, and documentation. Their robust features make them indispensable for companies looking to efficiently manage their localization projects and expand their global market presence.

Smartcat AI is an enterprise marketing AI platform. Part of its service offering is a fully comprehensive translation management system (TMS) that adapts to all your localization needs.

It connects businesses with AI translation and human translators and creates a continuous translation delivery loop. Smartcat is known for offering a good user experience and high versatility. It can translate a wide range of audiovisual files, making it particularly popular for localizing eLearning and marketing content.

Crowdin is a niche TMS that specializes in software localization. It's designed for developers, with a user interface adapted to their needs. Crowdin’s functionality is inspired by agile management, and its selling point is that it allows developers to get their mobile apps, web apps, and games translated in iterations.

Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of Smartcat and Crowdin to give you a general idea of the differences between the platforms.

AI translation combined with the use of translation memories and glossaries is the route to getting the best possible quality automatic translation the first time around. This reduces translation costs and the time spent on human review.

Both Smartcat and Crowdin harness the power of AI translation combined with translation memories and glossaries.

Knowing the difference between these key features is essential to understanding the value of a TMS for your enterprise.

AI translatio n is a kind of machine translation. Go ogle Tr anslate is an example of a neural machine translation (NMT) engine. It uses artificial neural networks to model language translation. By learning from large datasets, it adjusts its predictions through training to improve translation quality over time.

AI translation encompasses a broad range of advanced techniques. These include NMT as well as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and algorithms to enhance context, tone, and user preferences. It may combine various AI-driven approaches to improve accuracy and adapt translations to different contexts.

1. Smartcat AI translation learns from your edits over time and improves the more you use it, which reduces costs in the long term. You can adapt it for formality and sentence length. It’s included as standard in its pricing, and your data isn’t shared.

Smartcat also gives you an automatic Translation Quality Score (TQS) between 1 and 100, shown in real time on a simple dial. You can view it for the whole file and at the key and word level. There's also a quality threshold option you can use to help you save review time on less critical texts.

2. Crowdin harnesses a large language model to produce your draft translation. Its translation editor has an AI assistant for alternate suggestions, but using it can lead to additional charges. Your translations aren't private on the free version. Crowdin doesn’t have a feature similar to Smartcat's translation quality score.

Translation memories (TM) are databases (TMX file). Every time you do a translation, the content is saved there. A TM is vital because it contains all your past translations that have been subject to human review and final approval.

When you use AI translation, it can be programmed to "prefer" any translations in your TMs. This means you’ll get better output the first time around and reduce the number of changes that have to be made.

1. Smartcat automatically creates a TM for each new project. You can also import your existing TMs. It has a dedicated TM editor to easily make changes and updates.

2. Crowdin offers similar functionality except that there isn’t a dedicated TM editor.

Glossaries are wordlists. Simple glossaries show just the source language and target language side by side. Compl ex translation glossaries c an contain various languages and additional information, such as context.

Much like with translation memories, you can program the automatic translation in your TMS to select words from the glossaries to improve the quality of the initial output.

Both Smartcat and Crowdin offer comprehensive glossary builders with user-friendly interfaces.

A TMS with great AI translation is all very well. However, the human team is still essential to ensuring your localization project achieves success in new markets. When it comes to working with your in-house team and outsourcing tasks to external reviewers, Smartcat and Crowdin operate differently.

When you plan your localization project, it can be hard to figure out how many team members you’re going to need to complete every step of the project.

With Smartcat, this isn’t a problem. You get unlimited user seats, so you don't have to worry about making cuts to your localization dream team.

Crowdin lets you have unlimited translators on a project but limits manager seats.

If your enterprise needs to outsource tasks to external linguists, it’s essential to consider what that's likely to cost and how time-consuming it’ll be, especially with onboarding.

Smartcat keeps outsourcing simple for its clients through its marketplace. It does the procurement process for you. Your enterprise has just one contract and invoice directly with Smartcat.

This model offers excellent advantages:

1. By working directly with a professional reviewer, you pay linguist fees before they're inflated by a translation agency.

2. No vendor onboarding. Smartcat does all the admin.

3. You can choose the reviewers you want on your team (Smartcat's AI-powered matching tool can help you identify the right person for the job quickly).

Crowdin offers two vendor options. You can ask for a quote directly from its platform from one of its translation agency partners, or you can have Crowdin Language Services (also a translation agency) do the review work for you. With either of these options, you’ll be paying intermediary fees and have to do the vendor onboarding. You won’t know the identity of the people who do the work for you or be able to get them back another day.

A third option from Crowdin involves crowdsourcing volunteer translators. The human touch comes for free but the volunteers might not be professional translators, so the output might be sketchy.

The Smartcat freelance marketplace is home to qualified expert reviewers. You can purchase their services directly in the marketplace.

Crowdin offers a crowdsourcing option that depends on people doing review work for free. Their motives for doing this will vary, but they may be untrained or in need of experience. Their work might not meet professional standards.

"Smartcat's high-quality AI translation, collaborative workflows, and proprietary network of human editors has transformed our global operations by delivering superior translated content in hours instead of months and for a fraction of the cost compared to our previously outsourced solution," Mark Stauffer, Senior Learning & Development Manager for Brink's.

Smartcat is a much more feature-rich tool than Crowdin when it comes to project management.

Crowdin allows you to manually add project managers, who can set up basic projects and assign team members.

Smartcat AI adds an automated workflow to these basic features. This enables the project manager to automate the entire sequence of tasks from start to finish, from preparing the source text and AI translation to getting the translation reviewed and sent through final quality checks.

Both software platforms have a dashboard that shows project progress in real time. With Smartcat, you also get AI project monitoring. This can spot issues related to timings, quality, and price and even automatically reassign reviewers for you.

When assigning roles to your team, Smartcat offers more customization regarding user access levels and permissions. It also makes collaborative work easier by letting you have more than one person work on a document simultaneously.

Both TMS platforms support various file formats: documents, audiovisual files, web-based formats, and mobile application file types.

Smartcat has a security feature that blocks certain file extensions that are considered to represent security risks.

For some file types, such as OCR and MP4, Crowdin provides support through plugins to offer the features of other apps inside its translation editor. This allows it to support more file formats, but you'll need to install the plugins and have the relevant subscriptions. However, Smartcat has many of these possibilities built in.

An excellent example of a difference between how Smartcat and Crowdin work is when it comes to automatically transcribing videos. Crowdin transcribes MP4 files via a plug-in that uses the Amazon Transcribe API, so you need to pay for that service separately. Smartcat, on the other hand, is capable of transcribing videos directly on its platform without any extra charges or integrations.

A useful additional feature that Smartcat offers is that once you've subtitled your videos, you can add human-like AI dubbing. This is a good example of where Smartcat far exceeds the limitations of Crowdin in terms of being a comprehensive TMS for content localization.

Another file type that can be tricky i s translating images a nd scans without a text overlay.

Crowdin deals with this through an ABBYY Cloud OCR plug-in, which is all very well as long as you subscribe to ABBYY.

Smartcat extracts text from images via advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This feature is built into its software and no plug-ins are required. Learn more about image translation in Smartcat.

Smartcat and Crowdin are designed for continuous localization management, and so both have excellent localization capabilities.

Continuous localization management involves integrating localization processes into a product’s ongoing development cycle. This is crucial for software localization in particular because you can make real-time translation updates while ensuring consistency with previously approved translations. This massively speeds up delivery times.

You can push content back and forth between Smartcat or Crowdin and your CMS through integrations. Then, using translation memories, the reviewers can take advantage of previously approved content and make updates only where necessary.

Given that Crowdin is designed for software developers, its marketing focuses on agile translation management. It provides a wide range of integrations, and its crowdsourcing feature is useful for getting fans working on games for free.

Smartcat is just as agile as Crowdin. It enables you to work in iterations on any localization project, plus you can harness the power of AI for project management. This powerful combination can allow you to make massive time and cost savings with the help of the professional reviewers in its marketplace.

Smartcat and Crowdin both offer a wide range of integrations and versatile APIs. Whether you’re a marketing manager looking for website translation or a localization manager wanting to take an app global, both TMSs will help you streamline the translation workflow.

B oth platforms use APIs to automate translation processes. The Smartcat API also automates project management tasks to improve workflow, which are features that are unavailable in Crowdin.

APIs allow integration with various development and content tools, making them highly customizable for continuous localization. Both platform APIs are good for smaller projects, but the Smartcat API is the best for more extensive ongoing localization projects with complex needs.

Strong integration capabilities are a selling point for Smartcat and Crowdin.

Crowdin focuses on integrations for developers and designers, which makes it a popular choice for projects needing frequent software and design workflow content updates.

Smartcat offers a wide range of integrations, including ones for developers and designers. It’s excellent for connecting with your tech stack for marketing localization and eLearning localization. Its integrations will also go one step further to help you manage the translation workflow in-house through robust tools for working with localization teams and resource management without onboarding.

Smartcat and Crowdin are both known for having clean and intuitive user interfaces. Smartcat offers a wider range of services than Crowdin, so its interface contains more levels. However, the greater service complexity has not given rise to a more complex design. The dashboard is organized by category and is easy to navigate.

Regarding the translation editors, both are intuitive for a translator with experience with CAT tools and little training will be required.

It's worth noting that Smartcat is considered one of the most user-friendly translation software platforms. On G2, it has a rating of 9.6 for ease of set-up and 9.3 for ease of use, while Crowdin has 8.4 and 8.5, respectively.

With so much integration and the addition of AI, it's natural for users to be concerned about the security of their data.

Smartcat always applies best practices to ensure its clients never have to worry about security when using its platform. Very importantly, your data are exclusively yours and aren’t used to train Smartcat AI.

Crowdin also complies with industry standards to keep your data secure. However, if you use its free version, your translations will be stored in its translation memory. This means anyone with access to that memory can use your translations, for instance, to train machine translation software or influence AI output.

Find out more about how Smartcat keeps you safe.

Calculating the budget of your localization project from end to end can be challenging. So, most enterprises prefer a transparent and simple pricing plan with no surprises. Here's the lowdown on Crowdin vs Smartcat pricing.

Smartcat is about keeping things simple. After your 14-day free trial, you can choose between the small-team option (max. 150,000 words a year) or the customized enterprise option (plan tailored to what you need). All the integrations are included, so it’s easy to establish your project budget based on how many words you want to translate and review.

Crowdin has a more complicated price plan with several levels. Within each level, you pay for the number of managers and the number of words on a sliding scale. This makes budgeting more complex as you'll need to figure out how it works and calculate what you need.

Smartcat lets you have unlimited users at all levels of its price plan. This means you can have as many project managers, developers, linguists, and subject matter experts as you want to check your translations at no extra charge.

Crowdin offers unlimited translators, but the number of managers is limited by price level.

Smartcat offers a 14-day fully featured free trial version. Following the trial, you can sign up for its team or enterprise pack to continue using AI-based features. Translators get permanent free use of its CAT tool.

Crowdin has a permanently free version that includes its AI translation. If you use the free version, it can store your translations in its memory. It can use your data and content to train its translation engines. You'll also only be able to have public projects, meaning anyone with the link can view them. This isn’t a secure solution for standard enterprise use.

Smartcat and Crowdin offer good customer service, free training, and detailed developer documentation, as you might expect from paid translation platforms.

Smartcat offers free curated courses through the Smartcat Academy and individual guides, demos and videos through its Help Center. For a more personal touch, you have its customer support team and service level agreements .

Crowdin has a well-organized set of help documents and is available for personal support via chat and email.

Given that Smartcat offers an extensive range of features and project automation, it's ideal for localization managers in larger organizations. Its integrations make it excellent for software localization, and its ability to read and translate audiovisual formats makes it ideal for learning developers and marketing managers.

Crowdin users are mostly software developers. In part, they're taking advantage of the free public version and the ability to crowdsource fans to translate games. The platform is user-friendly and the ease of iterating with content makes it suitable for software localization managers, though its scalability for larger organizations is questionable.

Smartcat offers you an end-to-end localization solution. While it doesn't offer Crowdin’s free crowdsourcing element, in terms of what matters to enterprise clients, Smartcat offers all of Crowdin's most important features and more.

Here’s a checklist of the main reasons to choose Smartcat over Crowdin:

1. AI-powered translation learns from your past translations and edits to improve over time.

2. Your data are accessible only to you at all pricing levels.

3. AI vendor sourcing and workflow management maximizes time efficiency.

4. Reviewer marketplace lets you work directly with experts without onboarding.

5. Image text translation with in-built advanced OCR recognition (no plug-in).

6. Full video transcription and subtitling with AI voiceover are all included.

7. Content creation option.

8. Simple pricing structure with unlimited seat model.