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Strong on content and community. Documents are outside the model.
Crowdin's strength is localising content at scale with a contributor workflow around it. That is a genuinely different job from returning a finished document.
What it is good at
Scale and contributor workflow are the core of this category. Many contributors, many strings, one system of record.
Content and software formats are well covered. Getting strings in and out of repositories and content systems is what the category does.
The unit is the string. Documents do not decompose that way without losing the information that makes them usable.
Where the document itself is left to you
These are the gaps our pipeline exists to fill. They are about the file, not about the tool.
Layout does not survive decomposition
Extracting text from a slide deck and returning it is straightforward. Returning a slide deck that still looks like a slide deck is not.
Scanned content has nothing to extract
Recognition has to run before there is anything to translate, and in a mixed PDF that is a page-level decision.
No visual verification step
A string review does not show you that a translated heading no longer fits its box.
Reassembly lands on the requester
When the strings come back, rebuilding the file around them is work somebody has to do, and it is usually not the person who asked for the translation.
Capability comparison
Categories, not vendors. We do not publish anyone's pricing, including our own.
| Row label | Us | Raw MT / cloud translation APIs | TMS platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multilingual | Configured to your markets | A fixed list | A fixed list |
| Format preservation | Layout written back in place | Text or a rough file | Not an engine |
| Per-page processing plan | Each page routed on its own | One call, no quality control | Manual workflow |
| Multimodal input | Five source classes, five paths | Mostly text only | No |
| What you receive | Finished files | A block of translated text | Process management |
| Who owns the quality | Us | You | You |
How this sits next to Crowdin
Content goes one way, documents another.
Content and software localisation continue through Crowdin. Documents come through us and arrive finished.
For documents that originate in a content system, the connection between that system and our pipeline is scoped rather than assumed.
Nothing about the contributor workflow changes. Documents simply take a different path.
Questions
Can we replace Crowdin with this?
No. For content and software localisation with a contributor workflow, Crowdin is the right kind of tool. This covers documents.
Do you support web and markup formats?
No. HTML, XML, JSON, XLIFF and Markdown are not supported. Our formats are PDF, Office documents and images.
How do scanned documents get handled?
Pages without a text layer go down the optical recognition path, decided per page rather than for the whole file.
Is there a visual check?
Yes. The rendered output is compared against the source document before delivery, which is how layout failures get caught.
What about community or volunteer translators?
That is not our model. We provide the pipeline; who reviews the output is your process decision.
Send a document and see the difference.
Layout preservation is visible in the returned file, not in a feature list.
- No signup, no self-service portal — you send a file, we run it.
- You get the finished document back, not a screenshot of one.
- If it is not good enough, you have lost nothing.