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Transept vs Phrase self-serve vs enterprise
No cardFirst 5 pages freeYour work never trains AI
Literess, the AI editor in Transept
You: Make Grandma grumpier.
Literess: Done. She doesn’t just say it anymore. She grumbles it. sagte → raunzte
Ask in plain words. You approve every change. Meet Literess →
Phrase is the enterprise localization platform big teams choose when the budget has a line item for a “TMS” and the localization manager has a roadmap. It covers product strings, documents, vendor management, LQA workflows, SSO, and integrations with content, code, and marketing tools. For a 200-person company localizing into 15 languages with every release, Phrase is the right answer. For an in-house team, its Team plan costs $1,245 a month, billed annually (about $15,000 a year), and is bought through sales; freelancers and language service providers have separate plans, from $27 a month, billed annually. Transept covers documents and content (books, marketing copy, knowledge bases, launch kits, client deliverables) without the enterprise overhead. Here’s where each one is the better fit.
Enterprise depth vs self-serve agility
| Feature | Phrase | Transept |
|---|---|---|
| TMS depth (workflows, vendor mgmt) | Yes | NoNot our focus |
| LQA (Linguistic Quality Assurance) | Yes | PartialSmart Proofread |
| Translation memory | YesEnterprise TM | YesAuto-built, free, finds reworded matches |
| Decision-context memory | No | YesMatches carry the comments and alternatives behind them |
| Vendor & marketplace integration | Yes | No |
| Notion & Google Drive | PartialGoogle Drive, OneDrive and Box; no Notion | Yes |
| Model quality tiers (per doc/sentence) | Partial | Yes |
| Sentence-level alternatives | PartialTM and MT suggestions per segment | Yes |
| Self-serve onboarding (no sales call) | PartialFree trial on Freelancer, Professional and Software UI/UX; Team and up via sales | Yes |
| Free plan with core features | No | Yes |
| Pay month to month | NoAnnual or quarterly billing | YesMonthly, no minimum term |
| Starting price (paid) | Freelancer (1 seat) $27/mo; Team $1,245/mo; billed annually | €9/$10 a month, excl. VAT |
Phrase prices checked on October 5, 2026 against its published pricing. Phrase sets its own plans and prices, and they may have changed since. View Phrase pricing
Phrase is for localization operations: enterprise teams running ongoing programs across many regions, with vendor management, LQA, and audit. Transept is for document and content translation that needs to ship now. Use Phrase for the program and Transept for the project.
When Transept is the better fit
Document-first work
Books, marketing copy, FAQs, and launch kits, translated in a workspace built around the document.
Self-serve, immediate
Sign up, translate, and deliver without a sales call or an annual contract. Billing is monthly, with no minimum term.
Smaller teams
Content creators, small in-house teams, and marketing teams at growing companies. Phrase’s Team plan for in-house teams costs $1,245/mo, billed annually, and is bought through sales. In Transept, creating a team is free, and paid plans start at €9/$10 a month.
Reuse your best work, automatically
Transept reuses a sentence you already approved even when the new one is worded differently, because it matches by meaning as well as exact text. It passes those matches to the AI as it drafts and proofreads, so the memory shapes the draft as well as filling matched segments. The memory builds itself from every translation you approve, adds nothing to the price of a run, and imports TMX or XLIFF if you’re bringing an existing memory with you.
A memory with the reasons in it
Phrase’s memory stores the approved segment, and its engine passes fuzzy matches to the model as examples. Transept also keeps what surrounds a decision, such as the alternatives you rejected and the comments a teammate left, and feeds that back on the next run, so the AI repeats the choice behind your wording and stops offering the phrasing you already turned down.
4× cheaper model, matched
Give a model the decisions behind past translations, not just their final wording, and it stops guessing. With enough of that context, a model costing a quarter as much matched a premium one on our own benchmarks.
The memory bet— Don’t take our word for it —
The editor, in miniature
A working slice of the real app: Literess, the glossary, the styleguide, workflows, and translation memory are all live. Click around.
Simple pricing
1 credit = 1 source word. Pro mode costs 3 credits per word. What each action costs
Free
Always freeFor your first projects
Unlimited users
Translated and proofread on Standard. About five with Pro.
- Pro mode: the model thinks each passage through, 3 credits per source word
- Standard quality: fast, accurate, faithful
- Translation memory: your past translations, reused to keep new ones consistent
- Glossary, styleguide, QA, import / export: all included
- Notion, Drive, TMX / XLIFF: import, export, and bring your own memory
- 68 languages: from Spanish to Tagalog
- Paragraph-by-paragraph translation in every mode
- Literess, your AI literary editor: 10 messages free, then credits
- Originality reports: 2 included
- No card required
Lite
The pocket edition
Unlimited users
- Whole pages and documents in one run
- Unlimited originality reports
- Workflows: chain translation, proofreading, and checks into one run
- API, MCP & webhooks: automate runs, or let AI assistants work in your account
- Teams: create as many as you need and invite anyone for free
- Top up anytime: pack credits never expire
Starter
Most popularFor regular client work
Unlimited users
- 3× Lite’s credits: for weekly work
- Teams: invite anyone for free; add €29/$33 seats to fund a shared credit pool (80,000 credits a month each)
Pro
For higher volumeFor agencies & large catalogs
Unlimited users
- 3× Starter’s credits: headroom for batch work and full catalogs
- Priority support: a direct line and faster replies
- Predictable bill: most months need no extra credit packs
FAQ
- When you run a multi-region localization program with vendor management, LQA SLAs, custom CI/CD integrations, and a procurement budget. Phrase is built for that scale, and Transept isn’t.
- Both reuse your approved translations. Phrase’s TM is deep, with 101% in-context matches, and its Next GenMT engine passes fuzzy matches from your TM to the model as examples. Transept matches by meaning as well as by exact and fuzzy text, so a sentence you reworded still comes up, and it hands those matches to the AI as reference while it drafts and proofreads. Its memory also builds itself from the work you approve, searches your past comments and whole documents as well as segment pairs, costs nothing to reuse, and comes with every plan.
- Moving over is straightforward: export your translation memory from Phrase as TMX and import it into Transept. Phrase TMS exports term bases as XLSX or TBX, and Phrase Strings exports glossaries as CSV; save the source and target terms as a CSV and upload it when you create a glossary in Transept. Documents import as DOCX or Markdown.
- Enterprise localization teams usually use it for document-heavy work outside the main Phrase workflow: marketing copy, executive communications, internal docs, and other content a TMS isn’t suited to.
- Every change is recorded in an audit log. Documents are private by default, aren’t used for model training, and are hosted in the EU. A DPA is available on request, and the security page lists what we have and don’t have yet, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
- There’s no per-person price. Creating a team and inviting people is free on every plan, with no member cap, and by default each member’s work bills their own credits. For one shared budget, the team owner buys two or more seats, and each adds its plan’s monthly credits to a pool the whole team draws from: 80,000 for €29/$33 on Starter, or 240,000 for €79/$90 on Pro, excluding VAT. Seats only fund credits; nobody needs one to get access.
- Exporting is free. Documents go back into the original Word file, EPUB book, or Google Doc with their formatting intact, or out as a fresh DOCX, PDF, Markdown, or HTML file. Translation data exports as TMX, XLIFF, or CSV, the standard formats for moving memory between TMS and CAT tools, and glossaries export as CSV or TBX, so your memory and terminology can move with you.
- A lighter version. Teams review with role-based comments, external reviewers use client review links, and work is handed off through comments and their resolution. A workflow can also pause at a review step until someone approves, and one review screen shows every change before it’s applied.
- Translation runs on Anthropic’s Claude. Google (Gemini, through Vertex AI) reads PDFs and scans and powers the meaning-based search in translation memory, and the current list of every provider, with what each one does, is at transept.ai/subprocessors. Each sees only the block being worked on, for that one request, under commercial API terms that exclude inputs and outputs from training. Transept runs no models of its own.
- For documents, yes: there’s no length limit, one run takes a document into up to 20 languages, and a project keeps one glossary and styleguide across many documents. For enterprise procurement and audit needs (named operators per workflow, multi-tier approvals, a vendor marketplace), Phrase is still the better fit.
Keep reading around this comparison
- 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…
- FeatureA glossary the AI actually follows→Character names, product terms, brand phrases, client vocabulary. Build a glossary once (by hand, from a file, or from a sample document)…
- CompareTransept vs Lokalise for content work→Lokalise is one of the strongest enterprise localization platforms, built for product strings, continuous localization, and developer…
Built for work you answer for
Private by default
Your text is never used to train AI, not by us and not by any provider we use, and it stays out of our logs. Delete your account and your text is deleted with it.
How we handle dataSecurity you can check
Hosted in Germany, in Hetzner’s ISO 27001-certified data center. Every sub-processor is listed, and a DPA is one email away.
All sub-processorsGive it context
Glossaries, styleguides, translation memory and per-string notes go with every request. You set them up once per project.
GlossariesYou’re the human in the loop
The AI drafts; you decide. Review every change side by side, keep or revert it, and send a review link when a client needs to look.
Review linksAPI, MCP and webhooks
The full API on every paid plan. Connect Claude or another AI assistant over MCP, or start runs from your own tools.
Developer guideSomething bigger?
Large catalogs, custom workflows, a DPA for procurement. Transept stays self-serve; write to us for the rest.
support@transept.aiFeatured on
