The app growth stack

Comparison

App localization tools, compared

These translate what is inside the binary. Your store listing is a separate job with separate deadlines, and neither replaces the other.

There is no ranking on this page. Nobody here has run all 5 of these for a quarter, so a score would be invented. What follows is the shortlist, in alphabetical order, with one line on what separates each — and a link to the vendor’s own pricing page, because a price restated here would be out of date before you read it.

Conflict of interest

Appstro has free tools for the App Store listing side of localization — auditing which storefronts are localized, ranking which to do next, and drafting the metadata. It does not translate in-app strings, which is what every tool on this page does, so these are complements rather than competitors.

  • Crowdin

    Localization management with integrations into source control and CI rather than a manual export and import.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Lokalise

    Translation management covering the iOS and Android string formats directly.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Phrase

    Aimed at larger multilingual content operations, where app strings are one surface among several.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • POEditor

    Translation management across the common mobile string formats, with a smaller surface than the platforms above.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

  • Transifex

    Localization platform covering software strings alongside other content.

    Visit sitePublishes no price

What you have to check yourself

None of this is knowable from outside, and it is where the decision actually gets made.

  • Whether it handles String Catalogs (.xcstrings), not only .strings and .stringsdict. Xcode has defaulted new projects to catalogs since 15, and a tool that cannot read them puts you back on manual export.
  • Whether plurals survive the round trip. English has two plural forms and several target languages have more, which is exactly where a naive importer loses data.
  • Whether it can run from CI, so a new string reaches translators without someone remembering to export.
  • How it is priced — per string, per word, per language or per seat — because those scale completely differently as you add locales.
  • Whether machine translation output is marked as such, so an unreviewed string is not indistinguishable from a checked one.

Every link on this page was fetched and answered before it shipped, most recently on 2026-09-01. No tool paid to appear here and no link earns anything — see the disclosure page. Missing, wrong, or out of date? Tell us and it gets fixed.

See the full localization section for tools in this category that are not part of this comparison.

Other comparisons