Smartcat vs. Lokalise: Which is best for your enterprise in 2024?

Wondering whether Smartcat or Lokalise is the best system for translation management in your enterprise?

Well, wonder no more. This article is a Lokalise vs. Smartcat head-to-head battle. It’ll show you why Smartcat is the most comprehensive and economical option and help you choose the best AI translation platform for your business.

TMS stands for translation management system. Different TMS platforms are available on the market, and most include features like artificial intelligence (AI) translation and localization management tools.

All claim to be the best, and all offer a certain number of overlapping features. To varying degrees, all can help you save time, cut costs, and improve translation quality. But only a few of them truly stand out. If you've narrowed your choice of TMS down to Smartcat or Lokalise, here’s what you need to know.

Smartcat AI is a comprehensive, all-in-one localization platform. It offers secure, accurate AI translation and a range of automations to streamline localization. It’s an excellent DIY solution for enterprises that prefer to manage their own localization projects rather than outsourcing them to translation agencies. After producing a fast, high-quality AI translation, you can outsource quality checks directly to Smartcat's human linguists without intermediary fees or onboarding.

Lokalise is a niche translation management system and CAT tool. Much like Smartcat, it offers AI translation capabilities as a way to reduce human translation costs alongside a range of integrations. Make sure you don't get it mixed up with other TMS platforms with very similar names, such as Localize and Localizely.

Check out the table below for a quick overview of the differences between Lokalise and Smartcat features before we dive into the detailed breakdown in the following sections.

Gone are the days of simple machine translation. In today’s localization process, high-quality, adaptable AI-powered translation is essential for companies looking to reduce costs.

Both Smartcat and Lokalise have developed a proprietary AI translation tool that can be used as a standalone feature or from inside their translation editor.

In either case, you can set the AI translation to leverage the content of your glossaries and translation memories to help improve the quality of the AI output. Doing this will almost certainly bring you better translation results than using Google Translate or translations extracted from generic large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT or Gemini. (These options are also available in both tools.)

You can also change the AI output in both tools by using custom prompts to better control translation style, such as sentence length or tone of voice.

Here are a few differences between the tools:

• Smartcat subscriptions include AI translation as standard. With Lokalise, you pay for it separately as an add-on and otherwise have to use machine translation plugins.

• Smartcat artificial intelligence learns from your edits over time and improves the more you use it, reducing costs in the long term. Lokalise doesn’t appear to offer this feature.

• When it comes to human quality assurance, Smartcat lets you invite your favorite linguists from its marketplace directly to a project from inside the translation editor. This is a huge time-saver. Also, by working directly with freelancers, you avoid the intermediary fees charged by language service suppliers (LSPs), which isn’t the case with Lokalise.

Smartcat supports an impressive range of more than 50 file formats. Besides the basic office range you’d expect of an all-in-one CAT tool, it supports a wide range of localization formats and audiovisual files. Not only that, but it actually protects you by blocking certain files with extensions that are associated with security risks.

Lokalise, on the other hand, supports just 29 file types. These are mostly software localization file formats with no audiovisual support.

When it comes to translating documents, compatibility differs enormously between the two tools. Here are a couple of examples:

1. Lokalise can’t work with PDF or PPT files at all.

2. Smartcat can work with PDFs and extract text from PDF scans using its advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology. It's also compatible with PPT, making it easy to translate PowerPoint presentations.

For marketing translations, being able to translate images easily can make a big difference in project completion time.

1. Lokalise isn’t compatible with image files. You’d have to extract the image content into a different file format to be able to translate it in the CAT tool and save the content to your translation memory for future use.

2. Smartcat uses its advanced OCR to extract the text from images with 12 different image file extensions, including JPG, PNG and GIF. This makes it easy to keep image translations in your translation memories from inside the tool.

Find out more about image translation in Smartcat.

Smartcat is a market leader in video translation, which is one reason it's so popular for training course localization. Its AI will transcribe your videos and automatically translate them. It offers burned-in subtitles, and you can even get AI dubbing with a human-like voiceover.

Lokalise can’t translate videos.

Smartcat has a wide range of integrations, such as its WordPress plugin, which lets you directly use the Smartcat AI website translator. With these integrations, you won't have to copy and paste texts or have your developer download and upload files anymore. Your translations will be automatically pushed back to your website. Smartcat is a top website language translator and it'll be a great partner in your localization strategy.

Lokalise also has CMS integrations for website translation on its platform. Given that this functionality is similar between the tools, it’s best to consider other factors, such as interface usability and ease of outsourcing quality assurance checks, where Smartcat is the stronger tool.

A translation memory (TM) is a database (TMX file) where past translations are saved. It can contain millions of words. A TM is different from a translation glossary, which is a bilingual or multilingual wordlist.

Both of these tools are important for improving AI translation quality and informing your human translators of your brand guidelines and preferred terminology. By using them effectively, you can significantly improve the quality of automated translations the first time around, which can reduce human review time and costs.

Translation memories : When exported as a.tmx file, a translation memory is compatible across different CAT tools. While Smartcat and Lokalise apply their own rules for calculating repetitions, TMs function similarly on both platforms. However, there are important differences in the design and quality of the user interface for working with TMs, as detailed below.

Glossaries : While both TMS platforms have a glossary creation option, Smartcat allows you to create multiple glossaries and enter more detail than Lokalise.

See for yourself how easy it is to set up a glossary in Smartcat.

AI translation has had a huge impact on localization possibilities in terms of translation cost reduction. But artificial intelligence is far from infallible. The best practice is still to have human linguists review the AI output to make sure you have a first-rate translation that reflects your enterprise in the right light and maintains your brand voice.

That's why it’s important to consider how your chosen TMS can help you outsource reviews to freelance linguists.

When it comes to outsourcing tasks related to localization, Smartcat and Lokalise take very different approaches.

Smartcat connects its clients directly to freelance linguists in the Smartcat marketplace while taking care of procurement through a single contract and invoice via Smartcat. Here’s why this is a great option for you:

1. No intermediary fees from translation agencies or language service providers.

2. Full transparency as to the linguist providing the service; you can speak to them directly.

3. No vendor onboarding. Smartcat receives the vendor invoice and takes care of payment, saving you hassle.

Smartcat also offers AI-powered linguist matching. This saves you time by analyzing the content you want to translate and your needs (such as level of linguist expertise and price) and identifying linguist matches for you.

Lokalise has approved partners that you can contact to ask for translation quotes. These partners are large language service providers (LSPs) and agencies. You’ll have to pay intermediary fees and do the vendor onboarding. And you won’t be able to make direct contact with the linguists who do the work.

When you create a project in both TMSs, you can set up custom workflows. Smartcat employs AI to help you make your workflows as efficient as possible.

Lokalise AI enables you to automate the entire translation process from end to end. While this might sound like a dream come true, it goes against industry best practice, where human review is still recommended to prevent errors.

When assigning roles to people in your team, both Smartcat and Lokalise offer customizable user access levels and permissions.

Thanks to its Marketplace, Smartcat lets you assign individual translators and reviewers to your projects, which offers the additional benefits mentioned above.

Both TMS platforms have a dashboard that shows project progress in real time. Smartcat also offers AI project monitoring. Its AI can detect issues related to turnaround, quality, and price. If you give permission, it can even intervene and reassign linguists.

Both platforms enable collaborative work by letting you have different members of your team work on the same document at once.

Smartcat and Lokalise both use scoring systems to assess translation quality, but their systems are very different.

Smartcat automatically gives you a Translation Quality Score (TQS) for free on every AI translation and human translation you produce. The score is shown in real time on a clear dial as a number between 1 and 100. You can view the TQS at the file, sentence, and word levels. You can even set your desired quality threshold if you don't need the translation to be perfect. This can help you save review time or avoid review altogether if you’re not worried about the odd slip.

Lokalise charges per word to run its localization quality assurance check. You then get a detailed spreadsheet to download and study for each language involved. This is useful but quite cumbersome and pricey.

The marketing on the Lokalise website suggests that you can use their AI translation to set and forget, automating the entire process from the moment the content is created to publishing the translation. You would therefore be using AI to create and to score the translation. This is against current best practice in the industry because of the lack of control over what might end up getting published in your company's name.

From the integration perspective, both Smartcat and Lokalise are good TMS platforms for software and marketing localization. Whether you want website translation, software localization, marketing translation, or e-commerce translation, each offers a range of integration options to help you streamline workflow between your tech stack and their platforms.

One differentiator in this area is that Smartcat will create custom integrations for your enterprise. This will give you more flexibility, particularly if you use uncommon or bespoke systems.

Smartcat actually offers a Lokalise translation plugin for users who want to share content between the two TMSs.

Given that Smartcat offers more features than Lokalise, you might expect its user interface to be more crowded. In fact, the opposite is true. There's a reason why Smartcat is known as one of the best translation software platforms for businesses. On G2, it scores 9.6 for ease of set-up and 9.3 for ease of use (Lokalise has ratings of 8.8 and 9.0).

In Smartcat, the main dashboard is organized by category, making it easy to find what you want and click on it. The Lokalise dashboard shows a list of projects, but it's very busy, which makes it hard to find things.

The translation editor is also much more comfortable to use in Smartcat. It follows the standard layout generally used in CAT tools, and everything is intuitive to use. In Lokalise, the translator is confronted with an unusual layout that makes it hard to see the content in context. This discomfort could mean they take longer and are more likely to make mistakes.

The Smartcat pricing model allows unlimited users. This means you can prioritize teamwork and have as many project managers, linguists, and contributors on your team as you want at no extra charge.

Under the Lokalise pricing model, the number of users is limited: the more members you have in your team, the more you have to pay.

The other main factor in the pricing models of both companies is consumption. In short, the more you translate, the more you pay.

In this regard, Smartcat is easy to understand. After your free trial, you can choose a small-team option (max. 150,000 words a year) or a customized enterprise option (where your plan is tailored to your needs). With Smartcat, AI translation is included and it’s easy to establish your project budget based on how many words you want to translate.

Lokalise is more complicated and hard to compare with other TMS solutions. They have more price tiers and charge by strings (blocks of text) rather than the number of words (the industry standard). If you want to use their AI software to produce translations, you have to pay an AI translation add-on at a price comparable to the untrained end of the human translation market. All this makes it harder to predict your budget.

Both Smartcat and Lokalise offer good customer service, free training on how to use their platforms, and detailed documentation for developers.

With Smartcat, you get:

1. Up-to-date free learning resources through the Smartcat Academy and numerous step-by-step guides in the Help Center.

2. A customer support team for technical and platform queries. Clients just need to submit a support ticket. Different service level agreements are available to clients.

Lokalise also has a training center and a help center. Customers can initially contact customer support by talking to the chatbot on its website, which attempts to divert them to helpful links before letting them message humans.

Smartcat is a fully featured, all-in-one localization platform, which means its clients span a wide range of enterprises and government organizations. Its ability to handle numerous file types, including images, videos, and sound, makes it very popular among course developers and marketing managers.

Smartcat’s integration functionalities make it a great option for all types of localization managers, particularly in software localization. All these users appreciate how much it simplifies linguistic resource management through a single contract and invoice.

Lokalise is a niche localization tool targeting game, software, and mobile app localization into numerous languages at the same time. It’s currently expanding to target product managers in e-commerce localization. The Lokalise marketing message is “set it and forget it”, though the quality risks of fully automating the translation process from content creation to publication are evident.

There is little that Lokalise can do that Smartcat can’t. Considering the pricing models and user interface, Smartcat emerges as the more attractive option for most use cases. Here's a final summary of the main reasons to choose Smartcat over Lokalise:

1. AI-powered translation leverages your past content and learns from your edits to get even better over time.

2. AI linguist sourcing and project monitoring help you get higher quality and ensure turnaround.

3. Linguist marketplace to source linguists without onboarding (Smartcat handles vendor payments).

4. More comprehensive glossary creation.

5. Image text translation with advanced OCR recognition.

6. End-to-end video translation and audio file translation with AI voiceover.

7. Clean and intuitive user interface.

8. Transparent pricing with unlimited seat model.

Seeing is believing. Discover all the benefits of Smartcat for your localization projects. Book your free demo now.