Compared honestly
DeepL is a very good machine translation (MT) service. We are not going to pretend otherwise. The argument on this page is not that DeepL is bad. It is that DeepL is a subscription to somebody else's servers, and Local Translate is a program that runs on your Mac. That difference decides three things: what it costs you over three years, whether it works when the network does not, and who else gets to read what you translate.
What it costs
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the only number that matters once a subscription renews. All DeepL prices below were read live from deepl.com on 22 August 2026, in US dollars (USD), with euro (EUR) in brackets where DeepL prices the same plan in euros. The FX rate used for context is 1 EUR = 1.1699 USD, the European Central Bank reference rate for 21 August 2026, retrieved 22 August 2026. The page does not convert between the two lists: DeepL publishes them separately, the EUR list includes VAT and the USD list does not.
DeepL renamed its plans. Anything you read online from before 2026 will talk about Starter, Advanced and Ultimate for DeepL Pro, and API Free / API Pro for the developer product. Those names are gone from deepl.com. As of 22 August 2026 the live plans are Free version, Individual, Team, Business and Enterprise on the translator side, and Developer, Growth and Enterprise API on the application programming interface (API) side. The API side changed more than the name: the old API Free tier gave you 500,000 characters every month, forever. The current Developer plan gives you a one-time credit of 1,000,000 characters. Once it is spent, it is spent.
All DeepL Pro prices are per user. Annual billing is cheaper per month but is paid up front for twelve months. USD prices are the ones deepl.com shows with the region selector set to United States (USD $). EUR prices are the ones it shows for Germany (EUR), where DeepL states VAT is included in the price. US prices are shown without tax. Do not treat the EUR figures as a converted version of the USD ones, they are separate published price lists.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Included volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free version | $0 | $0 | 50,000 characters per month |
| Individual | $10.49 (EUR 8.99) per month | $8.74 (EUR 7.49) per month, $104.88 (EUR 89.88) per year | 300,000 characters per month |
| Team | $34.49 (EUR 29.99) per user/month | $28.74 (EUR 24.99) per user/month, $344.88 (EUR 299.88) per user/year | 1,000,000 characters per user/month |
| Business | $68.99 (EUR 59.99) per user/month | $57.49 (EUR 49.99) per user/month, $689.88 (EUR 599.88) per user/year | Unlimited, fair usage policy |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | Custom |
| Plan | Base price | Included volume | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | $0 | One-time credit of 1,000,000 characters, 1 API key, 1 glossary | None. There is no overage, the credit simply runs out. |
| Growth | $32.50 (EUR 29.75) per month, or $26.00 (EUR 23.80) per month billed annually, which is $312.00 (EUR 285.60) per year | 12,000,000 characters per year | $27.50 (EUR 22.00) per 1,000,000 extra characters, capped at 50,000,000 characters per month |
| Enterprise API | Custom pricing | Custom | Custom |
Local Translate is $30 once, standard price, and $10 once for the first 500 licences. Both are everything, forever, on 3 machines. The same account also covers BIM VPN and oMLX. There is no metering, no API key and no per-character cost, because the translation happens on your own hardware.
Per-character pricing is meaningless without a volume, so here is ours, stated openly. Target user: a foreigner living or working in Asia who translates web pages, documents and menus every day.
| What they do | Working | Characters per month |
|---|---|---|
| Full-page translation while browsing, 8 pages a day at roughly 6,000 characters of visible text per page | 8 x 6,000 x 30 | 1,440,000 |
| Loose text through the day: chat messages, emails, menus, signs, forms, package labels | roughly 7,000 a day x 30 | 210,000 |
| Documents and PDFs: contracts, invoices, a lease, school paperwork | roughly 4 documents a week at 12,000 characters | 200,000 |
| Assumed total | roughly 1,850,000, rounded to 2,000,000 per month |
That is 24,000,000 characters per year. A single content-heavy Chinese or Korean news page can run past 10,000 characters of visible text on its own, so this is a working figure, not a stress test. We also show a light case (300,000 characters per month, 3,600,000 per year) for someone who translates a few things a week rather than browsing in a foreign language all day, and a heavy case (5,000,000 per month, 60,000,000 per year).
| Option | Covers the volume? | Year 1 | Year 3 (cumulative) |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepL Free version | No. Caps at 50,000 characters per month, 4 percent of what is needed | $0 | $0 |
| DeepL Individual, annual billing | No. Caps at 300,000 per month | $104.88 | $314.64 |
| DeepL Team, annual billing | No. Caps at 1,000,000 per user/month | $344.88 | $1,034.64 |
| DeepL Business, annual billing | Yes, unlimited under fair usage | $689.88 | $2,069.64 |
| DeepL Business, monthly billing | Yes | $827.88 | $2,483.64 |
| DeepL API Developer | No. One-time 1,000,000 characters, about two weeks of this usage, once ever | $0 | $0 |
| DeepL API Growth, annual billing | Yes | $312.00 base + $330.00 usage = $642.00 | $1,926.00 |
| DeepL API Growth, monthly billing | Yes | $390.00 base + $330.00 usage = $720.00 | $2,160.00 |
| Local Translate at $30 | Yes, no volume concept exists | $30.00 | $30.00 |
| Local Translate at $10 (launch) | Yes | $10.00 | $10.00 |
Working for the API Growth line. Growth includes 12,000,000 characters per year. Our assumed user needs 24,000,000, so 12,000,000 are chargeable. 12,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 12 units, at $27.50 each = $330.00 per year of usage on top of the $312.00 annual base. Total $642.00 per year, $1,926.00 over three years.
At this volume, over three years, DeepL costs 64 to 69 times what Local Translate costs. That is the honest arithmetic and it is the whole reason this page exists.
| Option | Covers it? | Year 1 | Year 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepL Free version | No, caps at 50,000 per month | $0 | $0 |
| DeepL Individual, annual billing | Yes, exactly at the cap | $104.88 | $314.64 |
| DeepL API Growth, annual billing | Yes, 3,600,000 per year is inside the 12,000,000 allowance, no usage charge | $312.00 | $936.00 |
| Local Translate at $30 | Yes | $30.00 | $30.00 |
At light volume the gap is $284.64 over three years. Real, but not dramatic. If that is you, price is not the reason to switch, privacy and working offline are. Say so out loud rather than inflating the number.
| Option | Year 1 | Year 3 |
|---|---|---|
| DeepL Business, annual billing | $689.88 | $2,069.64 |
| DeepL API Growth, annual billing: $312.00 + 48 units x $27.50 = $1,320.00 | $1,632.00 | $4,896.00 |
| Local Translate at $30 | $30.00 | $30.00 |
Note the shape of this: on DeepL the API line crosses above the Business subscription somewhere past about 25,000,000 characters a year. If you are heading that way, Business is the cheaper DeepL. Our line stays flat because there is nothing to meter.
Feature by feature
Row by row, with the rows DeepL wins left where they fall. Every DeepL limit here was read from deepl.com on 22 August 2026.
| Local Translate | DeepL | |
|---|---|---|
| Offline operation | Yes. Fully offline after the first-run model download. Works on a plane, on a train, on hotel wifi that has given up. | No. Every translation is a request to DeepL's servers. No connection, no translation. |
| Where your text is processed | On your Mac. The model runs locally through oMLX. The local server binds to 127.0.0.1 only. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to promise about deletion. | On DeepL's servers. Paid plans are marked "No data training" and DeepL states content is deleted after processing. The Free version is explicitly marked as not covered by "No data training" on DeepL's own comparison table. |
| Character and volume limits | None. The only limit is how fast your Mac runs the model. | Free 50,000/month. Individual 300,000/month. Team 1,000,000/user/month. Business unlimited under fair usage. API Developer one-time 1,000,000. API Growth 12,000,000/year included, 50,000,000/month ceiling. |
| Document and PDF translation | Yes, unlimited. Layout-preserving for text PDFs. Scanned PDFs are detected and handled through a local optical character recognition (OCR) overlay. | Yes. Free 1 file/month up to 5 MB. Individual 3/month up to 30 MB. Team 20/month. Business 100/month up to 100 MB. |
| Screen and OCR translation | Yes. A global hotkey grabs a screen area, runs OCR locally and paints the translation back in place over the original, refreshing live. Offline, and with no daily character cap. | Yes. DeepL's Windows and Mac desktop apps have an Images tab with screen capture, and the mobile apps translate from the camera. Free plan image translation is limited to 1,500 characters per day. |
| Browser page translation | Yes. A bundled browser extension plus a dedicated browser profile translates a whole live page in place, offline. | Yes, full-page translation. Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Not available on the Free version. |
| API access, and what it costs | A local HTTP API on 127.0.0.1:8766, included in the one-time price. No key to rotate, no quota, no bill. | A separate paid product. Developer is a one-time 1,000,000 character credit. Growth is $312.00/year plus $27.50 per extra 1,000,000 characters. A DeepL Pro translator subscription does not include API access. |
| Command line interface (CLI) | lt is installed with the app and included.
lt --to ko "text", or pipe into it from stdin. No key, no cost, no network. |
A DeepL CLI exists as a developer tool, but it drives the paid API and needs an API key, so it carries API cost. |
| Text to speech | Built in. Speak the translation, with a selectable engine and optional voice cloning from a reference clip. | Not part of the translator plans. DeepL Voice is a separate paid product for live speech translation in meetings and conversations. |
| Device limits | 3 machines per account, and the same account also covers BIM VPN and oMLX. | Priced per user seat. A seat is a person, and DeepL does not publish a hard device cap. Unverified: we could not find a published per-device limit. |
| Platform support | macOS on Apple Silicon only. This is the single biggest limitation of our product and we are not going to bury it. If you are on Windows, Linux, iPhone or Android, Local Translate is not for you today. | Broad. Web, Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android, plus extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge and add-ins for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Google Workspace. No Linux desktop app is listed on deepl.com. |
| Language count | 5 in the target picker (English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, French), plus whatever else the underlying model handles. Nowhere near 125. | 125 language codes supported by the DeepL API, counting regional variants. |
| Translation quality | Our assessment: strong on Chinese, Korean and Japanese into English, which is what the default model (Hunyuan-MT2 7B, 4-bit) is built for. Good enough on European pairs for daily use. We publish no benchmark scores because we have not run a benchmark we would be willing to defend, and neither should anyone quoting one at you. | Our assessment: excellent, and the strongest thing DeepL sells. Particularly strong on European language pairs, where it reads more naturally than most alternatives. |
Where they win
If a comparison page tells you the seller wins on every row, close the tab. Here is where DeepL beats us, plainly.
DeepL's API supports 125 language codes. Our picker offers five. If you need Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi or any of the other hundred and twenty, DeepL has it and we do not.
125 language codes against our 5This is what DeepL is famous for and the reputation is earned. English to German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish: DeepL output reads better than ours more often than not. If your work is European business correspondence, that difference matters more than any price table on this page.
Their strongest row, and it is not closeDeepL runs on the web, Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad and Android, and plugs into Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Google Workspace. We ship a Mac app. If your day happens on a Windows laptop and an Android phone, we have nothing to sell you.
We are macOS on Apple Silicon onlyDeepL sells Team, Business and Enterprise plans with single sign-on, user provisioning, shared glossaries, shared style rules, team administration, analytics and reporting, SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. We sell a single-user tool with a three-machine allowance. There is no admin console and no shared anything.
Not on our roadmap, not in the productDeepL lets you fix how a term is translated, share the glossary across a team, upload it from a CSV file and generate one automatically. Team plans get 1,000 entries per language pair, Business gets unlimited. If your product names, legal terms or brand vocabulary must come out the same way every time, that is a real feature and we do not have an equivalent.
Team 1,000 entries per pair, Business unlimitedDeepL lets you pick formal or informal register in languages that distinguish them. For German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean business writing, that is the difference between a message that lands and one that reads wrong. We do not offer it.
Not available on the DeepL Free version eitherTranslation memory, style rules, computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool integration, audit logs and cost control settings are all on DeepL's higher tiers. None of them on ours.
Higher DeepL tiers onlyDeepL is a service someone else keeps running. Local Translate is software on your machine that needs about 4 GB of disk for the model, enough free memory to load it, and an Apple Silicon Mac. If that sounds like work you would rather not do, that is a legitimate reason to pay DeepL.
About 4 GB of disk, and a Mac you maintainWho should pick which
Both recommendations are real. One of them sends you to deepl.com, and we have left it standing.
This is the honest recommendation and it covers a lot of people. A few contracts a month between English, German and French, on a Windows laptop, with a colleague who needs the same glossary: DeepL Individual at $104.88 a year is the better product for you. Buy it. Nothing on this page argues otherwise.
DeepL Individual, $104.88 per yearFive target languages is five. There is no workaround. And if you are buying for a team, shared glossaries, single sign-on and an admin console are not things we are quietly working on. They are not in the product.
Language and team features go to DeepLWeb pages, menus, forms, delivery apps, group chats, a lease agreement, a bank letter. That is the workload where the per-character model turns into $642 a year and ours turns into $30 once.
$642 a year against $30 onceClient contracts, medical letters, legal correspondence, unreleased product documents, anything under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Not because DeepL is careless, it is SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certified and its paid plans exclude your content from AI training. Because the safest way to handle a document that must not leave the building is to not send it out of the building. Note also that DeepL's own comparison table marks the Free version as not covered by "No data training". If you have been pasting sensitive text into the free DeepL translator, that is the row to reread.
Nothing to leak if nothing is uploadedChinese mobile data, a plane, a high-speed train through tunnels, a conference wifi that dies at 9am, a hotel network that resolves nothing. DeepL is a cloud service, and a cloud service that cannot reach its cloud is a blank window. Ours does not care.
Works with the network unpluggedAnd plenty of people should. Local Translate for the daily volume and anything private, DeepL for the one German contract a quarter that has to be perfect. $30 once plus DeepL only when you actually need it is cheaper than DeepL Business and better than either alone.
A one-time $30 that keeps working in year fiveThree claims, and they are the only ones we make without hedging.
Your text never leaves your machine. The model runs locally through oMLX. The local API listens on 127.0.0.1 and nothing else. There is no account server to trust with your content, because your content never gets to one.
It works with no internet at all. After the first-run model download, unplug the network. Everything still works: text, screen capture, documents, the browser extension, the CLI. This is not a degraded offline mode, it is how the product runs all the time.
You pay once. $30, or $10 if you are inside the first 500 launch licences. Three machines. No renewal, no per-character meter, no API key with a quota attached to it. What you paid and when you paid it are recorded against your account, so "lifetime" is something we can be held to rather than something we say.
Buy Local Translate, $10 once What it does Download for macOS →
Every DeepL price and limit on this page was read from deepl.com on 22 August 2026 and is sourced line by line in COMPARISON-SOURCES.md. DeepL changes its pricing. Re-check before you rely on these numbers.