WPML vs Weglot

WPML and Weglot solve multilingual WordPress in fundamentally different ways. WPML runs as a regular WordPress plugin with translations stored in your database. Weglot is a SaaS proxy that translates your site’s rendered HTML on its own servers. That architectural choice — together with WPML’s purpose-built PTC translation engine — drives most of the practical differences below.

At a Glance

“Easiest” Depends on What You Measure

Weglot’s positioning is around ease of setup. WPML’s positioning is around quality of output. Both matter, but they measure different things.

Weglot is fast to install and configure. So is WPML’s Translate Everything Automatically — a single global setting, no per-page configuration. The setup gap between the two has narrowed considerably over the last 18 months.

What hasn’t narrowed is the quality gap. Because Weglot wraps DeepL/Microsoft/Google under the hood, the translation quality you receive matches the underlying engine’s output. The measurements above describe what that means at the page level: more visible mistakes, more pages that need review, more time spent in the review-and-fix workflow that AI translation was supposed to remove.

“Easiest” is the right question to ask if your evaluation ends at first-page-translated. “Lowest total time to publish” is the right question if your evaluation extends to first-page-published — because that’s where the review step lives, and PTC’s measured quality is what makes the review step optional for most content.

Pricing — The Gap Is Large at Any Meaningful Site Size

WPML’s Multilingual CMS tier covers unlimited languages on three sites for €99/year. PTC translation credits beyond the bundled 90,000/year cost €0.30–€0.75 per 1,000 credits depending on volume; the first 2,000 credits per month are free.

Weglot’s pricing scales with both word count and language count, and the language cap usually forces the upgrade. A site needing six languages can’t use Weglot’s Pro tier (5 languages max) regardless of word count, and must move to Advanced at €299/month — €2,990/year — for 10 languages. That’s roughly 30× the cost of WPML at the comparable scale, on top of WPML’s own translation credits.

Weglot also owns the translations: cancel the subscription and the translated content stops displaying. WPML’s translations live in your WordPress database — yours to keep, export, or migrate.

What Doesn’t Reach the Proxy

Weglot’s translation pipeline runs as a SaaS proxy. When a visitor requests a page in a translated language, Weglot intercepts the rendered HTML, translates it (caching the result), and serves the translated version. That works on first principle: whatever reaches the browser, Weglot can translate.

The trade-off is what doesn’t reach the browser at the moment Weglot looks. On a real production WordPress site, a meaningful share of translatable text falls into categories the proxy can’t reliably catch:

• Server-side outputs. WooCommerce transactional emails (order confirmations, shipping notifications, invoices), password-reset emails, admin-side strings, form submission confirmations sent by email — generated server-side and sent via PHP. They never pass through a browser, so they never pass through the proxy. A customer who buys from your translated storefront receives the order confirmation in the source language.
• WooCommerce variations and conditional UI. Variable products expose different text per variation, only when a visitor selects that variation. Cart, checkout, and account pages render only in specific session states. Each requires the right state to exist for the proxy to capture it.
• Custom fields populated dynamically. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) — common in developer-built WordPress — populate based on context. Fields that don’t render on a page Weglot has cached aren’t translated until they do.
• Form messages. Validation errors, success and error alerts, notification emails — these only render when a visitor triggers them, and notifications never render in a browser at all.

The operational consequence is a slow trickle. A specific error message gets translated the first time a visitor encounters it. An obscure product variation gets translated when someone selects it. A rarely-visited page sits in the source language until traffic finds it. Auditing what’s translated is genuinely difficult — you can’t review what isn’t on the page yet — and it pushes review and quality work onto the live customer experience rather than ahead of it.

WPML translates all of this content the same way it translates everything else. Translations live in the WordPress database, so anything that goes through WordPress — every variation of every product, every server-side email, every form message, every custom field whether it currently renders or not — gets translated through the same workflow, with full visibility into what’s translated and what isn’t.

WooCommerce: Multi-Currency and Per-Currency Gateways

Beyond the reachability question above, WPML’s WooCommerce stack covers capabilities Weglot doesn’t address. Multi-currency comes natively via WooCommerce Multilingual, free with every paid WPML plan, including per-currency payment gateways: Stripe for USD, Paystack for ZAR, Mercado Pago for BRL, and so on. Bulk catalog import via WPML Export and Import integrates with WP All Import Pro, WooCommerce CSV Importer, and similar tools. 100,000+ WooCommerce stores currently run on WPML.

Where Weglot Is the Better Fit

Weglot’s HTML-output approach genuinely sidesteps compatibility headaches that can slow down a WordPress-native plugin. On sites built with unusual plugin combinations — niche page builders, custom-coded blocks, plugin stacks that produce hard-to-reach content — Weglot translates whatever reaches the browser without needing dedicated compatibility code for each component.

If the multilingual budget is several thousand euros a year and not a constraint, translations living on Weglot’s servers is acceptable, and server-side content such as transactional emails isn’t critical to your site’s customer experience, Weglot’s SaaS-proxy model has a real place. For most multilingual WordPress sites, though, the cost-quality-ownership trade-off lands on WPML.

For a side-by-side comparison of all six major WordPress translation plugins, see Best WordPress Translation Plugin: A Detailed Comparison (2026).

FAQ

Can I move translations from Weglot to WPML if I switch?

Weglot stores translations on its own servers and offers an export, but moving the data into another plugin’s structure is non-trivial — translations can be re-used as input but typically need re-mapping. WPML stores translations in your WordPress database from day one, so there’s no future migration involved if you start there.

Does Weglot translate WooCommerce order confirmation emails?

No. Weglot’s proxy only translates rendered HTML that reaches a visitor’s browser. WooCommerce transactional emails are generated server-side and sent directly via PHP, so they never pass through the proxy. WPML translates these emails because translations live in WordPress alongside the email-sending code.

Why is WPML so much cheaper than Weglot?

Different commercial models. Weglot runs as a SaaS service, with infrastructure costs scaling per word translated and per visitor served. WPML is a WordPress plugin — your hosting handles serving, your database stores translations, and PTC credits are billed per word actually translated (currently €0.0012–€0.003 per word at retail), with the first 2,000 credits per month free for every account. The cost difference reflects what each model is paying for.

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Comparison maintained by the WPML team. Vendor data captured April 26–28, 2026; refreshed when material changes appear.