Looking for a Weglot alternative? Since 2016, we’ve been working on creating the best website translation plugin for your website, but we understand that we might not be the right fit for every company.

However, that hasn’t stopped us from aiming big. And with new product features regularly released, one of the highest-rated website translation solutions on G2, and a support team that’s considered the most reactive out there, we’re most definitely pushing boundaries!

When it comes to something as complex as translating your website into different languages though, finding the perfect website translation solution for your exact needs can be different for everyone.

At Weglot, our mission is to make it effortless for anyone to have a multi-language website, but if that’s not been your experience, then we’ll take a look into some Weglot alternatives and review the features and pricing of other popular WordPress translation plugins.

‍Note, we’re talking about WordPress in this article, but Weglot is also compatible with all content management systems (Shopify, Squarespace, Webflow, etc) and custom built sites. Check out our other integrations.

What are the Best Weglot Alternatives?

1. WPML

WPML was one of the first plugins to offer a comprehensive way to manage WordPress translation and create a multilingual WordPress site. Let’s look in more detail at its key features.

Key Features

Full Website Translation

With WPML, you can translate all your website pages, taxonomy, menus, posts, custom types, and even the theme’s texts.

Machine Translation

It automatically translates your website using leading machine translation providers including Google, Microsoft, and DeepL. Then, it allows you to review and modify translations as you see fit.

Human Translation

You can also use WPML to order professional language translation services to elevate your translations, or you can use the interface to assign jobs to your own team of translators.

Translation Management

WPML also comes with translation management features. Here, you can choose which strings to translate and assign them to a translator. WPML is also equipped with a Glossary and Translation Memory, helping you manage exactly how you want your terms to appear throughout your multilingual site.

Multilingual SEO Friendly

It also enables your site to be multilingual SEO friendly. It allows you to translate your URLs, establishes SEO meta information for your translated content, links translations together, and adds sitemaps with the correct pages.

WPML Drawbacks

Limited Languages

WPML uses machine translation to translate your website into 65 languages, so it is worth checking first if your language is supported.

Manual Installation Process

If you want to maximize WPML’s power, you’ll need to install 4 plugins in total:

• WPML Multilingual CMS
• String Translation
• Translation Management
• Media Translations

Once you’ve installed and configured each plugin, you can then turn your website multilingual by using the Translation Management plugin. It’s not as automated as other website translation plugins on the market, there are several manual steps, so that’s just something to be aware of.

Translation Process

Let’s take a look at the translation process. It’s at this point where you can select the pages or posts you want to translate. Then, choose the languages you want WPML to translate them into. You’ll need to do this on a string-by-string basis if you’re using the machine translation feature, this can’t be handled in 1 click.

While WPML translates 100% of the content inside your WordPress editor, for content that falls outside of this, you’ll need to switch to a different interface that involves using the String Translation dashboard. With WPML, you need to handle the translated content in separate interfaces, depending on where the content is coming from.

This can make managing your translations a slightly longer process than with other solutions.

Limited Automatic Translation

WPML offers automatic translation on a credit basis with 2 approaches. For the pay-as-you-go option, you get 2,000 credits for free each month. Then, if you need more, you can purchase 8,000 additional credits for up to $6.

The second approach is by buying prepaid credits, where you buy them once, and then assign them to your sites as you see fit. You can also use these credits for sites that don’t have a pay-as-you-go subscription, and the credits never expire. Under this plan, you can get 40,000 credits for $50 and 200,000 for $180.

How Does It Compare With Weglot?

With Weglot, you can translate your website and display the translations in 1 click. No need to install multilple plugins or to get it to work as you want. Everything you need is in 1 dashboard, and as soon as Weglot is installed on your site, it’s fully translated with a first layer of machine translation, no matter where the content is coming from (3rd party plugin, etc).

Plus, you’ll have your pick of languages: Weglot supports over 110 languages, and you can also add custom languages like Canadian French to make your website even more accessible to your audience.

Automatic translation is also fully integrated within the Weglot WordPress translation plugin, so you don’t need to go in and manually validate strings for translation, Weglot scans your site in seconds to deliver all your translations inside your Weglot Dashboard, where you can manage and make edits where required. Automatic translation is also already included in your plan, depending on your specific needs, so there’s no need to pay for separate credits.

2. Polylang

Polylang is another powerful contender you can use to make your WordPress website multilingual. It supports over 100 languages and is also multilingual SEO friendly. Note, Polylang doesn’t allow for automatic translation. You’ll need a separate plugin, which we’ll discuss below.

Key Features

Full Website Translation

With this plugin, you can translate several elements of your website: pages, posts, media, tags, and categories. However, you can also use it to translate other aspects, like navigation menus, URLs, post types, widgets, and even custom taxonomies.

Smooth WordPress Integration

It integrates seamlessly with the WordPress interface, so you won’t have to change the way you normally manage your website when you oversee your translations. It’s also fully compatible with WooCommerce and provides you with a customizable language switcher.

Multilingual SEO

Polylang is compatible with leading multilingual SEO plugin, Yoast. Through Yoast and Polylang you can translate titles, slugs, meta descriptions, and any other fields.

With Polylang, you also have the option to use a subdirectory, subdomain, or domain per language you use. And, if you have the higher tier plans, you can share translated slugs between posts or pages—something WordPress doesn’t allow by default. Polylang also automatically adds hreflang tag attributes to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage.

Import/Export

For Polylang users, handling translation is done manually with professional translators. For many, handling this outside of your Polylang dashboard means the import and export feature is a useful way to download the content of your site, translate it with outsourced professional services and import when ready.

Polylang Drawbacks

A Separate Automatic Translation Plugin

As mentioned earlier, Polylang works great for adding manual translations to your WordPress site. This can either be handled by yourself or bilingual teammates, or by using professional translation services.

However, it’s also possible to set it up with automatic translation. To do this, you’ll need to install Lingotek Translation (now known as Ray Enterprise Translation) to make this happen and, importantly, upgrade to a paid plan. Ray Enterprise Translation works by using Microsoft’s API translation software, a popular machine translation provider.

Note that at the time of writing, the Ray Enterprise Translation plugin hasn’t been tested with the most recent major release of WordPress.

So, even though it’s possible to use automatic translations with Polylang, the plugin might be a better fit for those who have a team of professional translators at their disposal.

WooCommerce Compatibility

If you want to use Polylang with your WooCommerce store, you’ll need to download the Polylang for WooCommerce plugin. This plugin comes at an additional expense depending on how many sites you want to use it for. However, it’s possible to bundle this with a Polylang Pro plan.

Manual Translation Management

Because of the nature of manual translation and Polylang’s interface, managing translations in different languages may be more time-consuming than using other WordPress translation plugins on the market. That’s because users may need to spend more time to polish their translations and maintain high quality throughout their website.

How Does It Compare With Weglot?

Weglot has automatic translation integrated into all plans, whether free or paid so you won’t need to add additional translation plugins to translate your site—installing the plugin does all this for you, instantly.

But it also incorporates human translation. If you prefer to manually translate your site, Weglot makes that easy through its Translation List, where you can see your translations side by side and organized by URL or by searching for a specific translation.

If you prefer to see your translations in a real-time preview of your site, there’s also the Visual Editor.

Weglot has built-in multilingual SEO functionality and follows best practices when translating your site to ensure search engines index your site properly and don’t flag it for duplicate content, such as adding hreflang tags, translated metadata, and the option to translate your slugs. This is handled directly by Weglot, there’s no need to install a 3rd party multilingual plugin. If you do though, Weglot is fully compatible.

Overall, Polylang is highly focused on manual fine-tuning, which is great for those who are extra hands-on with their project management. On the other hand, Weglot mixes machine and human translation for high-quality translation at scale and workflow automation to make your translation project run smoothly.

3. TranslatePress

TranslatePress is a translation plugin exclusively for WordPress and is the newest of all the translation tools.

Key Features

WooCommerce Compatibility

It’s compatible with WooCommerce, so you can use it to translate all sorts of transactional pages, including: product pages, checkout, the shopping cart, and more to support your ecommerce store.

Machine Translation From Top Providers

It also generates machine translation through DeepL and Google Translate, and it translates everything visible on your website page. That includes content from plugins and texts embedded within WordPress’s code that you otherwise can’t change from the admin interface.

Full Website Translation and Localization

TranslatePress supports dynamic strings (gettext) that WordPress, themes, and plugins add to your website.

You can also use the plugin to translate large sections of html with only one translation and translate images directly from its interface, allowing you to display different photos for each language version of your website.

With TranslatePress, you can customize your language switcher, and view your website through the perspective of someone currently logged in or out.

TranslatePress Drawbacks

Manual Translation Process

While TranslatePress gives you the option to use machine translation within your website translation process, it implements this on a manual basis once you’ve installed it.

You need to click on ‘Translate page’ for each page you want to translate, then hover over the specific string and manually add the translated content. Make sure to click ‘Save changes’ to push the translation live.

You’re then required to repeat that across your site, choosing what content you do and don’t want to be translated.

As this is a more manual approach to content detection and translation, it can lead to human error. You may end up overlooking strings and having translated and non-translated content on the same page, which is never recommended.

No Free SEO Support

TranslatePress doesn’t offer SEO support on its free plans; only paid plans and up. So you’ll need to purchase a paid plan for multilingual SEO capabilities.

Additional Cost for DeepL Integration

You’ll also need a business license and upwards to use DeepL’s API to translate your website, get automatic language detection, and the ability to edit different menu items for different languages, and so on. DeepL is considered a leading machine translation provider for several language pairs, in particular European languages.

How Does It Compare With Weglot?

Weglot automatically detects and translates 100% the content of your site, translating it instantly. This means you won’t miss any strings.

As Weglot continuously syncs with your site to translate any content changes or updates, you can be confident that your site is always translated. Plus, Weglot translates the invisible parts of your website that’s often ignored, like metadata.

For those who are looking for the most accurate machine translation providers, it’s useful to know that Weglot uses an additional machine translation provider that TranslatePress doesn’t: Microsoft. That means Weglot can support an even higher number of languages. And by using DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft, we always select the most accurate provider based on language pair.

Additionally, Weglot applies multilingual SEO best practices regardless of your plan. You’ll have a fully multilingual SEO website even on the free plan. See more via our pricing page.

Note, while Weglot hosts translations on our own servers, this doesn’t mean you don’t get full control over them. With Weglot, you still have complete freedom to import or export your translations, allowing you to export them if you choose to stop using Weglot at any point.

Handling translations outside of your WordPress dashboard also means that you can add translators to your project without them having access to your CMS credentials or risk them making any unwanted changes to your front-end site.

Why Weglot is Still the Best Website Translation Software in 2023

With Weglot, you get comprehensive website translation all from one centralized dashboard:

Fast, 1 click install and full website translation

• Automatic content detection, translation, and display of translated content
• Includes media, URL and slug translations, dynamic content like popups, buttons, etc
• Choose between subdirectories or subdomains
• Plus a fully responsive technical customer support team

Machine translation from leading providers

• Weglot provides a first layer of machine translation using the most accurate language pair from DeepL, Microsoft, and Google Translate

Easy translation management ‍

• Visual Editor
• Glossary of terms
• Translations List view
• Integrated professional translators
• Translation exclusions
• Full website localization
• Teammate collaboration features across your translation project

Multilingual SEO-friendly

• Follows Google's best practices for multilingual websites
• Automatically added hreflang tags
• Translated metadata
• Language-specific subdirectories or subdomains
• Automatic visitor redirection

Automatic translation workflow

• Continuously syncs with your live site so any changes you make, including new content, are automatically detected, translated, then displayed on your website so no page is left untranslated (unless purposely excluded)
• All translations are handled through 1 centralized Weglot Dashboard, even 3rd party app and plugin content
• Assign translations to teammates, translators, or send them directly to professional translators
• Export/import translations to manage them independently of the dashboard‍

Get started with Weglot’s 10-day free trial

Weglot is a user-friendly and simple website translation software that works seamlessly with any website—especially WordPress.

For full control over your translations, an intuitive website translation management experience, and a fuss-free translation management system, Weglot has what you need to run a seamless multilingual website.

We have a variety of pricing plans that suit different needs: the number of sites you want to translate, the languages you want to add to your website besides English, and the other features you’ll need to get your multilingual website exactly as you want it.

Try Weglot’s 10-day free trial, no commitment, and see for yourself just how easy it is to have a multilingual WordPress website up and running!