Head to head · Translation · October 2026 research run

Lingo.dev vs TranslatePlus

Lingo.dev scores 66.1 (B) on agent readiness against TranslatePlus's 39.7 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. TranslatePlus leads on payments & pricing. Both do translation.

Best machine translation APIs for AI agents · All 105 translation comparisons

Which one, for what

Lingo.dev B

Best 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

  • Reliability, 81 against 45
  • Schema & documentation, 64 against 52
  • Agent ergonomics, 75 against 61
  • Security & auth, 62 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 87 against 10
  • Transparency & trust, 72 against 52

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • No incidents deducted, where TranslatePlus loses 3 points for them

Watch for

No public OpenAPI file was found, docs pages have no Markdown version and error bodies carry only a free-text message

TranslatePlus E

Best for Low-cost per-request translation of short strings, HTML, emails, subtitles and i18n files for small projects.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 30 against 20

Watch for

llms.txt claims a 99.9% uptime SLA and SOC 2 Type II, while the terms disclaim any uptime guarantee and no audit is named

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Maintenance & community Lingo.dev +77

Lingo.dev 87

The weekly changelog's latest entry, W43 on 30 October 2026, shipped engine context provisioning from a website (30). Twelve weekly changelog entries since 4 August (W32 on 9 August to W43 on 30 October), and the lingo.dev CLI shipped 0.138.5 to 0.138.9 between 19 August and 5 October, with 0.138.10 and 0.138.11 (7 and 26 October) dependency-only (20). Per the 8 October check, the GitHub repository had 5,402 stars and 17 open issues, each with at least one comment and most of them requests for new functions, with two compiler bug reports from March 2026 open; not re-read on 2 November. The weekly changelog is public and the site links a Discord community (17 of 25). The official MCP registry lists dev.lingo/main 1.0.0 at https://mcp.lingo.dev/main, a different path from the /account endpoint in the docs. The JavaScript SDK last shipped on 26 October 2026 (0.17.4, a dependency bump) and the Python SDK on 7 March 2026 (1.5.0, from its repository tags) (12 of 15). The repository runs pull-request checks and a release workflow and overrode dependencies for advisories on 26 October. Per the 8 October check, @lingo.dev/cli states no licence, repository or engines field on npm (8 of 10).

TranslatePlus 10

The newest dated change found is translateplus-python 2.0.7 and translateplus-js 2.0.1 on 11 January 2026, about ten months before this check, and the API changelog stops at 9 December 2024 (0). No release or dated change in the last 90 days (0). Support by email and a support portal; the status page hasn't updated since January (3). SDKs exist for four languages but haven't changed since January (5). Weekly downloads of 4 (PyPI) and 6 (npm) (2). 0+0+3+5+2 = 10.

Reliability Lingo.dev +36

Lingo.dev 81

Hosted reading of the checklist, for the REST API and the hosted MCP server. status.lingo.dev runs on OpenStatus with WEB and API monitors and an events history (20). Between 4 August and 2 November the history lists one incident, a partial outage of the localization endpoint on 22 September 2026 from 22:09 to 23:59 UTC, in which 'a portion of localization requests' failed and other services were unaffected. Partial, so minor (20). The 18 July partial outage has left the window. Daily token quotas are published per plan, 100,000 on Sandbox and 5 million on Production, with no per-second request limit found (12 of 15). The errors page says to retry 500 with exponential backoff and not to retry 402 or 429, and async job creation takes an idempotencyKey. No Retry-After header is documented (12 of 15). The pricing page lists a 99.99% uptime SLA for Enterprise without publishing the document, and the terms say the company strives for 99.9% without a guarantee (7 of 10). Version 1.0 shipped on 15 March 2026 and nothing on the API pages is marked beta (10).

TranslatePlus 45

Hosted lines. status.translateplus.io is the vendor's own page; on 6 November 2026 it showed 'All systems unknown' and a last update of 22 January 2026, with data loading by script (5). No incident history to read (5). The rate-limits guide gives 100,000 requests a minute and 100,000,000 an hour per key, while llms.txt gives 50 requests a second on the Free plan, so limits are published but inconsistent (10). 429 returns a JSON detail message, responses carry X-RateLimit-Limit, -Remaining and -Reset, and the guide shows waiting for the reset with capped retries (15). No SLA. The terms say TranslatePlus strives for 99.9% uptime 'but do not guarantee uninterrupted service' (0). API v2 is the current, non-beta version (10). 5+5+10+15+0+10 = 45.

Security & auth Lingo.dev +27

Lingo.dev 62

The MCP server uses OAuth with PKCE and dynamic client registration and publishes no scopes. API keys are stored hashed, shown once and revoked by deletion. Personal keys carry their creator's full access, and keys with their own role and engine scope need Enterprise. No documented option puts a key in a URL (22 of 30). RBAC with 20 permissions exists on Enterprise only. On other plans every member is an Owner. The MCP server can create and revoke API keys and invite members with admin access by default, and no confirmation step is documented (8 of 20). Responses are translations of the caller's own content, while engine provisioning reads links the caller supplies. No injection guidance was found (7 of 15). Request logs with model, tokens and full input and output are on every plan. The append-only audit log, which records the acting user or key and the IP address, is Enterprise only (12 of 15). security.txt gives a contact and a disclosure policy with a safe-harbour promise and a maximum reward of a $50 gift card. The site states SOC 2 Type II, with the report available on Enterprise. No bug bounty or public advisories were found (13 of 20).

TranslatePlus 35

One API key per account in the X-API-KEY header, which the docs say 'carries full access to your account's resources', and can be revoked in the dashboard (15). No scopes or read-only keys (5). Translations return the caller's own text, so little untrusted content (10). llms.txt claims request logging and an analytics dashboard, which we couldn't see without an account (5). translateplus.io/.well-known/security.txt returns 404 and no disclosure policy was found; llms.txt says 'SOC 2 compliant' and 'SOC 2 Type II certified infrastructure' with no report or auditor named (0). 15+5+10+5+0 = 35.

Transparency & trust Lingo.dev +20

Lingo.dev 72

The platform is closed under published terms. The legacy CLI, the JavaScript SDK, the compiler and the Python SDK are Apache-2.0, and the current @lingo.dev/cli package states no licence (18 of 30). The terms and the privacy policy agree that user content is not used to train AI models and that AI providers keep content for up to 30 days by default. The privacy policy gives translation data 30 days by default while the pricing page gives 7 days on Sandbox. The Data Processing Agreement the policy refers to is not published (17 of 30). The terms promise advance notice and migration instructions for breaking API changes without stating a period, and the older CLI's docs are kept under a legacy section (8 of 20). The terms name Supabase in Frankfurt and Cloudflare. The sub-processor page the privacy policy points to, lingo.dev/security, redirects to a 404 page (2 November), and the LLM providers are not listed as sub-processors on any page we read (8 of 20).

TranslatePlus 52

Editorial half only. Closed service under terms last updated 18 December 2024 that name PetaBytes, Inc. as a US corporation but give no address, governing law or courts (10). The terms say translation requests aren't permanently stored 'unless required by law', the privacy policy says 'unless required for caching or service improvement purposes', and the terms allow using anonymised usage data to improve the service (8). API v1 is kept as legacy, with no dated deprecation notice (5). No subprocessor list or data location found (0). 10+8+5+0 = 23.

Agent ergonomics Lingo.dev +14

Lingo.dev 75

API reading of the checklist. Sync responses return only the translated data, the model and a usage block, and job lists return summaries without output. The MCP server covers team, role, key and audit administration alongside translation, with no documented toolsets or read-only subset, and its tool count is unpublished (15 of 25). Job lists page by cursor with limit from 20 to 100 and filters for engine and status (20). Errors are keyed on seven status codes with retry advice for each group, but the body has no machine-readable code (15 of 20). Async job creation is idempotent with idempotencyKey. The sync call has no such key, and MCP annotations could not be read (12 of 20). A sync call needs three fields and falls back to the organisation's default engine. JavaScript and Python SDKs exist, though the Python one last shipped on 7 March 2026 and the docs site has no SDK section (13 of 15).

TranslatePlus 61

API reading. Batch translation of up to 100 texts a call and separate HTML, email, subtitle and i18n job endpoints (16). Few output controls or filters (10). Errors are a detail string with HTTP status codes (12). No idempotency key for i18n jobs, though text translation is stateless (8). Official SDKs listed for Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, Java and PHP, with few required fields (15). 16+10+12+8+15 = 61.

Schema & documentation Lingo.dev +12

Lingo.dev 64

No OpenAPI file was found. https://api.lingo.dev/openapi.json returns 404 and the docs link none. The open-source JavaScript SDK carries typed request schemas, and the MCP tool definitions can't be read without signing in (5 of 25). llms.txt now indexes the docs, pricing and guides, and llms-full.txt lists every docs page with a description, including 28 API reference pages, which render as server-side HTML. Docs pages have no Markdown version (10). The reference says what each endpoint is for and when to pick the sync call or async jobs (16 of 20). Parameters have types and limits, such as 1 to 100 target locales, 100 locked-key patterns and five job statuses, while data is a free-form object by design (11 of 15). Request and response examples are given in up to five languages, and one page lists seven status codes. Error bodies hold only a message string (12 of 15). A weekly changelog runs from 15 March to 30 October 2026. No API version in the path or a header was found (10 of 15).

TranslatePlus 52

No OpenAPI or other machine-readable contract found in the docs or either llms.txt (0). llms.txt on the site and on docs.translateplus.io (10). Endpoint pages say what each call does, with little on when to choose HTML, email or i18n jobs over plain text (10). Required fields and per-plan character limits per request are documented, without enums for language codes beyond a supported-languages call (10). Code examples in several languages and an error-handling guide with status codes (12). Versioned /v1 and /v2 paths and a changelog, whose newest entry is 2.0.0 on 9 December 2024 (10). 0+10+10+10+12+10 = 52.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLingo.devTranslatePlusEdge
Reliability16%208145Lingo.dev +36
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26452Lingo.dev +12
Agent ergonomics13%16.27561Lingo.dev +14
Security & auth14%17.56235Lingo.dev +27
Payments & pricing10%12.52030TranslatePlus +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88710Lingo.dev +77
Transparency & trust7%8.87252Lingo.dev +20
Negative events≤150-3
TotalB 66.1/100E 39.7/100

Facts side by side

FactLingo.devTranslatePlus
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorReplexica, Inc.PetaBytes, Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.lingo.dev/accountno (local only)
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicenceProprietary 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 npmnone
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
MCP registrydev.lingo/mainnot listed
Last release2026-10-302026-01-11
Terms last updated2026-05-072024-12-18
Privacy policy last updated2026-05-07no date given
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity5.4k stars, 92k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk6 npm/wk, 4 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.3/5 (4)none

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

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, and scoped keys, roles and audit logs are limited to the Enterprise plan.

TranslatePlus

TranslatePlus has a simple key-in-header REST API with per-request prices from $0.0001, a 5,000-request free plan, batch, HTML, subtitle and i18n endpoints and documented 429 handling. Its changelog and SDKs haven't changed since January 2026 or earlier, the status page is stale, and llms.txt promises an SLA the terms disclaim.

Before you call either

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

TranslatePlus

  1. Send the key as X-API-KEY; there is no read-only or scoped key
  2. Use /v2/translate/batch for up to 100 texts instead of looping single calls
  3. Keep each text under the plan's per-request character limit (500 on Free, up to 2,000 on Mega)
  4. On 429 wait until X-RateLimit-Reset, then retry a few times at most
  5. Don't rely on an SLA; the terms don't guarantee uptime

Questions

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

Lingo.dev scores 66.1 (B) on agent readiness against TranslatePlus's 39.7 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. TranslatePlus leads on payments & pricing.

Do Lingo.dev and TranslatePlus need an API key?

Lingo.dev takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in. TranslatePlus needs an API key.

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

Lingo.dev has a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.lingo.dev/account. No hosted endpoint is listed for TranslatePlus.

Other comparisons with Lingo.dev or TranslatePlus

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