In-context editing, built into the JS SDK. Hold Alt/Option and click any piece of text in a live web app to edit the translation directly, with an automatic screenshot for visual context. This works through Tolgee’s JavaScript SDKs (React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, Next.js, vanilla JS) plus the Tolgee browser extension, on every plan including free. It’s a web-app feature: it isn’t available for native Android, iOS, or Flutter UIs, since there’s no rendered DOM to attach the editor to.

A built-in CDN. Tolgee’s Content Delivery feature publishes translation files to a public CDN URL (or your own S3/Azure Blob storage on Team+ plans) with near-real-time propagation. Lokalise doesn’t offer an equivalent hosted CDN; its closest option is exporting language files to your own S3 or GCS bucket.

OTA updates for native mobile. Tolgee’s Android and iOS SDKs support over-the-air translation updates, so you can push new translations without an app store resubmission.

Actually open-source. The Tolgee core is Apache 2.0 licensed and hosted on GitHub. Teams can self-host on their own infrastructure for full data control, or use Tolgee Cloud. Lokalise offers neither open-source code nor self-hosting. The backend itself is built on Kotlin and Spring Boot, both mature, widely-used enterprise technologies, and since the code is public, any engineering team can inspect it directly rather than taking a vendor’s word for how it’s built.

A free API, on every plan. Tolgee’s REST API is available starting on the Free plan, at no extra charge and with no feature gate. That means custom integrations, automated pipelines, and homegrown tooling can all be built on the API from day one, whether or not you’re a paying customer yet. If a tool from our 20+ native integrations doesn’t cover a specific workflow, teams can build their own connector directly against the API rather than waiting on us to ship it. Lokalise’s API is limited to paid plans, officially starting at Explorer ($144/mo); the 14-day trial includes it temporarily, but there’s no permanent free tier with API access, so testing an API-based integration before committing to a paid plan isn’t possible on Lokalise the way it is on Tolgee.

Enterprises can start without waiting on a vendor. This is a common reason larger organizations pick Tolgee: because it’s open-source, a security or platform team can pull the public Docker images and deploy it on-premises today, for $0, without a sales call, a procurement cycle, or a contract. If they later want Enterprise features (SSO, premium support, an account manager), that’s a conversation they can have on their own timeline, not a gate they have to pass through just to evaluate the product. Lokalise is cloud-only, so evaluating or deploying it, at any tier, always starts with “Talk to Sales” or “Book a demo.”

Bring your own LLM for AI translation. Tolgee’s AI Translator can run on your own API keys, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (including a self-hosted model via something like LM Studio), on both Tolgee Cloud (per organization) and self-hosted instances. On Cloud, Tolgee also includes Anthropic Claude and OpenAI access out of the box using its own MT credits, so bringing your own key is optional, not required. There’s also an AI Playground for customizing the actual translation prompt. Lokalise doesn’t publish an equivalent option: its AI translation runs through its own managed “AI orchestration” system, which automatically routes each translation to one of its own partnered LLM providers, there’s no documented way to plug in your own API key or pick a specific model.