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Head to head · Translate text · October 2026 research run

Crowdin vs Lingo.dev

Crowdin scores 69.6 (B) on agent readiness against Lingo.dev's 62.3 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Lingo.dev leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do translate text.

CrowdinCrowdin OÜ · HTTP API B69.6/100#153 of 722 Lingo.devReplexica, Inc. · HTTP API B62.3/100#341 of 722

Which one, for what

Crowdin B

Good for Teams that keep product strings and files in Crowdin and want an agent to upload sources, check progress, apply pre-translation, manage glossaries and pull builds.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 78 against 71
  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 54
  • Security & auth, 68 against 62
  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 20
  • Transparency & trust, 79 against 71

Watch for

The terms forbid accessing the service to monitor availability, performance or functionality, or for benchmarking, without Crowdin's prior written consent

Lingo.dev B

Good for Product teams that translate interface strings and content into many locales and want glossary, tone and rule control held in one place, driven from code, CI or a coding assistant.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 75 against 69
  • Maintenance & community, 87 against 82

Watch for

No public OpenAPI file was found, llms.txt holds one title line and docs pages have no Markdown version

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCrowdinLingo.devEdge
Reliability16%207871Crowdin +7
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28054Crowdin +26
Agent ergonomics13%16.26975Lingo.dev +6
Security & auth14%17.56862Crowdin +6
Payments & pricing10%12.53020Crowdin +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88287Lingo.dev +5
Transparency & trust7%8.87971Crowdin +8
Negative events≤1500
Total69.6 · B62.3 · B

Facts side by side

FactCrowdinLingo.dev
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorCrowdin OÜReplexica, Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://api.crowdin.com/api/v2https://mcp.lingo.dev/account
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Crowdin's terms. The CLI and the official API clients are MITProprietary hosted service under Lingo.dev's terms of service. The lingodotdev/lingo.dev repository (legacy CLI, JavaScript SDK, compiler) and the Python SDK are Apache-2.0. The @lingo.dev/cli package states no licence on npm
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesno
MCP registrynot listeddev.lingo/main
Last release2026-09-302026-10-07
Terms last updated2026-09-242026-05-07
Privacy policy last updated2026-09-242026-05-07
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot found in the text
Popularity320 stars, 264k npm/wk, 14k PyPI/wk5.4k stars, 92k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk

Verdicts

Crowdin

The REST API has a public OpenAPI document with 374 operations, and tokens can be limited by scope, access level and project. Translation runs inside Crowdin projects and connected engines, so it is not a stateless per-character translation API. No Retry-After guidance, idempotency keys or SLA were found in the reviewed documentation.

Lingo.dev

Lingo.dev suits teams that want glossary and tone control on every translation call, with a published fee of $2 per million output tokens and model costs passed through. It has no public OpenAPI file, its llms.txt is one line, and scoped keys, roles and audit logs are limited to the Enterprise plan.

Before you call either

Crowdin

  1. Send Authorization: Bearer <token> to https://api.crowdin.com/api/v2. Crowdin Enterprise uses https://<organization_domain>.api.crowdin.com/api/v2
  2. Use the MCP V2 endpoint https://mcp.crowdin.com/v2/mcp and set crowdin-tool-sets, because the server loads all 33 tool sets by default
  3. Set crowdin-read-only: true on the MCP connection for exploration. It exposes only list and get tools
  4. Keep to 20 concurrent requests an account across all tokens, and add your own backoff on 429
  5. Upload a file to /storages first, then pass the storageId to the add-file call. Builds, exports and reports are asynchronous and need a status poll
  6. /mts/{mtId}/translations takes at most 100 strings a call and needs the mt scope and a configured engine

Lingo.dev

  1. Send X-API-Key to https://api.lingo.dev and keep the key server-side. On non-Enterprise plans a personal key reaches every engine its creator can
  2. Use POST /process/localize for one language pair and POST /jobs/localization with an idempotencyKey for several. Pipeline stages run on async jobs only
  3. Treat 402 (credit limit) and 429 (daily token quota) as limits to report, not to retry. Retry 500 with backoff
  4. Read usage.cost on each sync response to track spend. Sandbox stops at 100,000 tokens a day
  5. Connect MCP clients to https://mcp.lingo.dev/account. Its tools can create and revoke API keys and invite members, so ask before those calls

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Crowdin or Lingo.dev?

Crowdin scores 69.6 (B) on agent readiness against Lingo.dev's 62.3 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Lingo.dev leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community.

Do Crowdin and Lingo.dev need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Crowdin and Lingo.dev without installing anything?

Yes. Crowdin has a hosted endpoint at https://api.crowdin.com/api/v2 and Lingo.dev at https://mcp.lingo.dev/account.

Other comparisons with Crowdin or Lingo.dev

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