GTranslate vs Weglot for WordPress

GTranslate and Weglot are two of the most widely used translation plugins for WordPress, and on the surface they promise the same thing: a multilingual site, no code, live in an afternoon. Look a little closer and they're built on different economics — one charges for features and leaves your word count alone, the other charges by how much you translate and into how many languages. This is a neutral, side-by-side read of GTranslate vs Weglot for WordPress: how each one works, what they cost as you grow, how they handle SEO, and a simple way to tell which fits your site.

Everything below is drawn from each vendor's public pricing and documentation and from independent reviews, dated where it matters. Figures were checked in June 2026; pricing pages change, so confirm the current numbers on each vendor's site before you buy. The aim isn't to crown a winner — both are good at the job they're built for — but to make the trade-off legible so you can choose on fit.

GTranslate vs Weglot at a glance

Both are no-code, hosted (SaaS) translation plugins with large WordPress user bases and machine translation at their core. The differences that decide most cases are the pricing model, how each treats word volume, and what comes included on the lower plans.

How each plugin works on WordPress

Both install without touching your theme and add a front-end language switcher, so the day-one experience is similar. What differs is what happens underneath.

GTranslate installs from the WordPress.org directory — the "Translate WordPress with GTranslate" plugin has a large installed base and a high user rating — and renders your site through Google's neural machine translation into 100-plus languages. The free plan adds a language selector and machine translations with no cap on words or page views, but those pages aren't search-indexed and you can't edit the output. Paid plans add manual editing, search-engine indexing, translated URL slugs (from the Business tier) and the option to host languages on custom subdomains or domains (the Enterprise tier).

Weglot connects your site to its service, detects your content automatically, and lays down a first machine-translation pass — drawing from DeepL, Microsoft, Yandex or Google depending on the language pair — which you then refine in a visual editor that shows changes on a live preview of your page, or hand to professional translators booked through the dashboard. Multilingual SEO is set up for you: each language gets dedicated URLs and hreflang tags so the translated pages can be indexed and rank.

What they cost as your site grows

This is where the two genuinely diverge, and it's the single most useful thing to understand before you choose.

GTranslate charges for features, not volume. Every plan — including the free one — carries unlimited words and page views, so a large blog or a deep catalogue doesn't push the bill up. What you pay more for is capability: paid tiers run from $9.99/mo (a configurable "Custom" plan) through $19.99 (all languages, with indexing and editing), $29.99 (adds translated URLs) and $39.99 (adds language hosting on custom domains). Billing is monthly or annual, with annual saving roughly two months.

Weglot charges for volume. The subscription scales with the total number of translated words across your site and the number of languages you translate into, and the word allowance is a fixed total rather than a monthly refill. Plans start at €15/mo and the language caps step up unevenly, so adding one more language or growing your content can move you to the next tier regardless of the other dimension. Prices are in euros, so the dollar figure moves with the exchange rate.

SEO, indexing and who owns your translations

On their paid plans, both plugins serve translated pages that search engines can crawl and index — real URLs per language with hreflang — which is what lets those pages rank rather than sitting behind a browser-only switch. The one documented exception is GTranslate's free plan, which isn't indexed and is meant for visitors switching language by hand; anyone who needs multilingual SEO will be on a paid GTranslate tier or on Weglot.

There's a second point worth knowing because it's structural, not a flaw in either tool: both are hosted services, so your translations live on the vendor's servers rather than in your own WordPress database. If you stop subscribing, the translated pages stop serving. That's the trade-off of the hosted model and it applies to both equally; plugins that store translations in your database (for example WPML or TranslatePress) make a different trade in the opposite direction. And because both work by translating the HTML that reaches the browser, content that never renders to a public page — WooCommerce transactional emails like order and shipping notifications, for instance — sits outside what either one translates.

So which should you choose?

Read it off your own site rather than off a ranking.

1. Choose GTranslate if volume and budget lead. A large or fast-growing site — a busy blog, a deep WooCommerce catalogue — where a per-word model would climb quickly, and you're comfortable with Google machine translation and lighter editing. Unlimited words on every plan is the draw.
2. Choose Weglot if editing and quality lead. A contained set of languages where you want a visual post-editing workflow, a choice of machine-translation engines, the option of professional translators, and clean SEO indexing included from the entry paid tier.
3. Sanity-check both on your real numbers. Estimate your full translated word count and your final language list, then price each tool against those. The cheaper option flips depending on how much content you have and how many languages you need — there's no single answer.

When the goal is selling, not just translating

One thing both plugins share: their job is translation — making the WordPress site readable in another language. If the underlying goal is selling into a new market rather than only translating, that's a wider set of needs than a translation plugin covers, including localized SEO that ranks in-country, prices in local currency, duties and taxes at checkout, and local payment methods. That's a different category of tool — platforms such as Glopal, which has worked in cross-border e-commerce localization since 2007, sit there rather than alongside GTranslate and Weglot. If you're weighing the full picture, our rundown of the best Weglot alternatives for e-commerce lays the options out side by side.

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