Transept vs Lokalise for content work

Where each tool is the right pick

Lokalise prices checked on October 5, 2026 against its published pricing. Lokalise sets its own plans and prices, and they may have changed since. View Lokalise pricing

Lokalise is built for continuous product localization, with a separate workspace, Vantage, for marketing and long-form content. Transept is built for translating documents and content. The two overlap on documents, glossaries, and translation memory, but they start from different problems. If you’re localizing iOS strings, you want Lokalise. If you’re localizing a launch kit, a Notion workspace, or a 200-page book, you want Transept.

When Transept is the better fit

FAQ

• Can I use Lokalise and Transept together?+

  They work side by side, and many teams use both: Lokalise handles the product strings and Transept handles documents and marketing content. To share one glossary, export it from one tool and import it into the other.

• Does Transept have an API?+

  On every paid plan (not on Free), the public API imports documents and string files, runs workflows across languages, and reads the results back. When you re-import a changed file, only the changes are translated. Webhooks tell you when a run finishes, and an MCP server lets AI assistants such as Claude work in your account. The developer guide is at transept.ai/developers.

• How is Transept’s translation memory different from Lokalise’s?+

  Both remember what you’ve translated and reuse it. Lokalise saves every translation entered in the editor, uploaded, or set through the API, shows a stored entry as a suggestion at a 50% match or better, and its Pro AI uses the memory and your glossary as context. It’s strong for continuous software localization. Transept builds its memory automatically from every translation you approve and matches by meaning as well as by exact text, so a reworded sentence comes up as well as a near-duplicate. It also searches past comments, chat, and whole documents, not just segment pairs. For software strings, Lokalise is the right pick; for documents and content, Transept is.

• Do I have to maintain the translation memory or pay extra to reuse it?+

  No to both. Transept’s memory builds itself from the translations you approve, so there’s no separate database to curate and no concordance to manage. Inserting a match costs nothing, matches in the AI’s prompt add nothing to a run’s price, and it comes with every plan, including Free. If you already have a memory elsewhere, import it as TMX or XLIFF; you can export it the same way whenever you want to move.

• How do I know whether I need Lokalise or Transept?+

  Are you localizing strings in a JSON file your engineers ship with the product? Lokalise. Are you localizing a document, an email, a FAQ, or a blog post? Transept. Both? Both.

• Can Lokalise translate a DOCX or PDF?+

  DOCX, yes; PDF, no. Lokalise’s document projects and its Vantage workspace take DOCX, PPTX, IDML, and HTML files and keep their layout, formatting, and images on export. PDF isn’t among its supported formats. In Transept, a Word file also comes back in its original layout, and a PDF can be translated onto its original pages.

• Can Transept translate HTML email templates without breaking them?+

  Transept keeps HTML email templates intact: upload the template’s HTML and export one file per language: the layout, inline styles, and table structure come back untouched, because Transept writes the translations into your original file instead of rebuilding it. Liquid and merge tags are hidden from the AI and restored afterwards, and each reply is checked against the source, so a lost placeholder is repaired before it ships. Templates localized with Braze translation tags or Mailchimp language conditionals are read as they are, with no reshaping first.

• How do the AI features compare?+

  Both offer AI translation. Lokalise’s Pro AI routes each job between large language models such as GPT and Claude, uses your glossary, translation memory, and styleguide as context, and scores translation quality; DeepL and Google Translate are available too. Transept runs on frontier models (currently Anthropic’s Claude) through an engine that isn’t tied to one provider, with sentence-level alternatives, glossary enforcement, and a multi-stage QA workflow built for documents.

• Can I share glossaries between the two tools?+

  Through CSV, with a little reshaping. Lokalise downloads a glossary as a semicolon-separated CSV with a header row and one column per language. Transept’s Upload tab takes one term per line, with source, target, and an optional context hint separated by a comma or a tab, and no header row; Transept exports CSV or TBX. Keep the master copy in one tool and re-import it from time to time.

• Which is cheaper for a small team?+

  Transept, by a wide margin. Lokalise starts at $149 per month, billed annually ($169 billed monthly). In Transept, creating a team and inviting your translators is free, paid plans start at €9/$10 a month (Lite) with glossaries, styleguides, QA, and Pro mode included, and a shared credit pool is optional: €29/$33 per Starter seat, with each seat adding 80,000 credits the whole team draws from. Lokalise’s pricing reflects the value it delivers on continuous product localization, which is a different problem.

Keep reading around this comparison

• FeatureDocument translation that holds together→Upload a DOCX, EPUB, Markdown, or PDF file. Transept splits it into blocks and translates each one with the whole document as context, so…
• FeatureBatch translation without the spreadsheet→Taking a document into 12 languages usually means a spreadsheet of files, a project manager, and a week of follow-up. With batch…
• FeatureTranslation memory that remembers your decisions→Every translation decision becomes memory: the wording you approved, the alternatives you rejected, and the comments that explained why. We…
• CompareTransept vs Phrase self-serve vs enterprise→Phrase is a powerful enterprise localization platform with a deep TMS, vendor management, integrations, and LQA. Transept is a different…

Built for work you answer for