Compare
A private DeepL alternative that runs on your device.
DeepL translates your text on their servers, under a privacy policy. Traxlate translates it on your machine, where a policy is not needed — the text has no path to a server. This page is honest about what each approach buys you.
The one difference that matters
Every cloud translator — DeepL included — works the same way: your text is sent to their servers, translated there, and sent back. What happens to it in between is governed by a policy you are asked to trust. DeepL’s policies are reputable, and for many people that is enough.
Traxlate is built the other way around. You install a language pack once, and from then on translation runs in your browser, on your hardware. “We can’t read your text” is not a promise we make — it is a consequence of the architecture. There is no server translation path to opt out of.
Side by side
| DeepL | Traxlate | |
|---|---|---|
| Where translation runs | Their cloud, always | Your device, always |
| Privacy model | Policy-based — you trust their handling | Architectural — the text never leaves |
| Price | Free tier, then €7.49–49.99 per seat per month | $0 for 2 pages every 5 hours, up to 30 a month, on-device; $9.99/mo Pro for more pages, sync and the local API |
| Document translation | Free tier: 3 small files per month, then paid | 14 formats plus PDF, on the same page allowance |
| Longest single document | Capped per file and per tier; a book means splitting it up | A whole book in one go on a paid plan — no page ceiling, no per-page fee |
| Glossary | Suggested terms; enterprise glossary features on paid tiers | Enforced — your term appears in the output, exactly as you wrote it |
| Formality control | Yes, in 9 languages | Yes, in 7 — and never by rewriting: the run promotes a rendering it already produced in the register you asked for, or says plainly that none matched |
| Rephrasing | Click-to-rephrase alternatives | Tap any sentence for the other renderings the engine measured — real output it considered, never a fresh invention |
| Subtitles and camera | Not offered | Both, on the device: SRT/VTT subtitles from your own video, and camera translation |
| Translated PDFs | A translated PDF back | The same, with a selectable, searchable text layer — verified round-tripping Arabic and CJK |
| Glossary import | CSV and TSV | CSV, TSV, TXT and the translation-industry formats: TBX, TMX, XML |
| Did it get it right? | No per-sentence account | A receipt for every run: which sentences were independently checked, which were not, and what looked wrong |
| Teams | Seats, admin controls and central glossaries on business tiers | Seats, invitations, admin roles and a team-wide two-factor policy — and a shared glossary whose key travels in the link fragment, so the server that stores it cannot read it |
| Works offline | No | Yes, forever, after a one-time pack install |
| Languages | Their published list | 66, of which 18 are tuned hardest — we refuse languages we can’t do well |
Choose DeepL if…
- You need maximum polish in a language pair we haven’t tuned as hard. DeepL’s perceived quality in its core European pairs is deservedly famous, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this site doesn’t make.
- You want formality in a language we don’t cover. DeepL offers it in 9; we cover 7, and outside those the setting does nothing.
- You want the model to rewrite for you — a sentence made friendlier, shorter, or corrected in your own language. That is DeepL Write, and we have no equivalent. We deliberately don’t rewrite: our one measured attempt at a general rule corrupted four of five control sentences, so we show you the renderings the engine actually produced instead of inventing a new one.
- Your work lives inside Outlook, or a CAT tool like Trados, memoQ or Phrase. DeepL has add-ins and plugins for those and we have none. We do reach Microsoft Word — the Windows app installs a Traxlate tab — plus a command-line tool and an MCP server, which leaves the mail client and the CAT tools to them. A browser extension is built and waiting on store review; it is not something you can install today, so we do not count it.
- You can’t spare roughly 2 GB of disk for a language pack, or you work on a device too weak to run one.
Choose Traxlate if…
- The text is the kind that shouldn’t travel — contracts, medical records, unreleased work, anything under NDA. On-device means the question of who can read it never comes up.
- You translate documents in volume. Our 14 document formats and PDF translation cost the same page allowance as any other text — no separate document tier and no per-file charge, because they run on your hardware, not ours.
- Your terminology must survive. A Traxlate glossary entry is enforced in the output, not suggested — a product name that must never be translated, stays.
- You need it to work offline — on a plane, behind a firewall, in the field.
- The job isn’t only prose. Subtitles and camera translation run on the same device, and no cloud translator offers them.
- You want to know what to double-check. Every run ends with a receipt naming which sentences were independently verified, which were not, and anything that looked wrong — rather than one confident block of text.
- Your team shares terminology but not its text. Seats, invitations and admin roles work the way you would expect; the shared glossary is encrypted with a key that rides in the link fragment, so our server holds the blob and cannot read it.
- You’d rather pay $9.99 a month for sync and a local API than per seat for the right to translate. Translation itself is free here, on any plan.
The honest row
We don’t publish a benchmark table claiming to beat DeepL, because single-number comparisons flatter whoever ran them. What we will say plainly: Traxlate runs two engines against each other and checks the winner before you see it, and does all of it without your text leaving the machine. How fast that is depends on your hardware, so this page does not quote one number: Settings reports what your own device achieves. Try both on your own text — that is the only benchmark that matters. The guide explains exactly what gets installed and what runs where.