Polylang alternatives when manual translation gets slow

Polylang is free, has no limit on languages and gives every translation its own WordPress post. It does not translate for you: the free plugin leaves translation to people, and Polylang Pro adds DeepL one post, page or product at a time, on your own DeepL API key. On a site that publishes a few pages a year, that is little work. On a site that publishes every week, the translated posts pile up, and the five alternatives below are for that kind of site.

I make LangRelay, which is one of the five. Facts about Polylang and the other vendors are as their own pages stood on 7 October 2026.

What Polylang leaves to you#

For a site that publishes often, three points from Polylang's own documentation matter.

Polylang's DeepL guide says editing the original does not update its DeepL translation; you edit the translation by hand or generate it again. Polylang Pro's synchronized posts copy an edit across languages, which keeps the same content in each post rather than translating it.

Polylang's features page also says Pro has no one-click way to translate the whole site, and its DeepL integration does not work with Elementor and some other page builders.

On a store, WooCommerce needs the Polylang for WooCommerce add-on, from €99 a year, which works with the free Polylang or with Pro. Polylang Pro itself costs €99 a year for one site, €198 for three, €297 for five and €495 for 25, excluding VAT.

A switch also gives things up. Polylang's free version supports a subdirectory, subdomain or separate domain per language, translations are ordinary WordPress posts, and a Pro licence that you stop renewing keeps working without updates or support.

The five alternatives#

WPML: keep the model, automate the work#

If you like having a WordPress post for each language, WPML keeps that model. With Translate Everything Automatically on, WPML picks up new posts and edits and translates them with its PTC engine, which can hold drafts for a Translation Manager first, as WPML's AI translation settings describe. Its Multilingual Blog plan, at €39 a year, does not include AI translation, so the comparison with Polylang Pro starts at Multilingual CMS. The WPML vs Polylang page compares the two in full.

TranslatePress and LangRelay: stop duplicating posts#

Both translate the page WordPress renders, so a new post is one post, whatever the number of languages.

TranslatePress translates strings on a live preview of the page and, with automatic translation on, translates new text the first time a visitor opens it in a language. It counts AI words per word and per language against a quota that comes with each yearly licence.

LangRelay's plugin reports a new or edited post about a minute after you save it, and only the new text is translated. By default a translation goes live as soon as it is ready, and free checks hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price. To approve every page yourself, in a grid or in a visual editor that shows the page at desktop, tablet and mobile widths, choose Ask me first. During the pilot it supports nine languages, where Polylang sets no limit, so check yours first.

Linguise and GTranslate: hand it to a service#

A hosted service takes translation out of WordPress. Linguise's install guide says the whole site is translated in every chosen language once the API key is applied, and it bills source words times languages per domain. GTranslate's paid plans have no word or page-view limit, within fair use: its terms treat recurring traffic above 100,000 translated page hits in 24 hours as excessive. Neither stores translations in your WordPress database, and I found no approval step for single translations on either vendor's site.

A worked example: a year of new posts#

Take a blog that publishes eight 1,000-word posts a month in English and translates them into three languages. That is 24,000 words of translation a month, or 288,000 in a year. This is a worked example, priced from each vendor's page on 7 October 2026.

With Polylang, it is 24 translated posts to create each month, by hand or with DeepL one at a time, plus whatever DeepL bills your account.

With WPML on Multilingual CMS (€99 a year, excluding VAT), the 22,500 included AI words cover most of the first month, leaving about €3 of pay-as-you-go. WPML prices pay-as-you-go in monthly volume bands, so a full 24,000-word month comes to about €55, and the lowest price reached in a month carries over to the next three months as the starting price, which brings later months to about €47 each. These figures assume the included words do not count toward the bands; WPML's pricing page does not say.

With TranslatePress, Personal's 50,000 AI words last about two months. A year of this blog needs 288,000 AI words. Personal plus three of TranslatePress's 100,000-word packs (€24 each, bought from your account page) gives 350,000 words for €171; Developer includes 500,000 for €349 a year.

With GTranslate's Startup plan the bill is $25 a month however much you publish, within fair use.

With LangRelay, the 24,000 words come out of a monthly allowance that renews, so on a plan whose allowance covers them, the cost stays the same each month for the same output. The pricing page has each plan's allowance.

Moving off Polylang#

Polylang's translated posts stay in your database whichever way you go. With WPML you keep a post per language. With a one-post tool, the new tool translates the originals again, and you can unpublish the old translated posts once the new language paths are live. Set redirects from the old translated URLs if they differ.

For the full head-to-head with LangRelay, see LangRelay vs Polylang. The WPML alternatives page covers the same choice from the WPML side.