ConveyThis vs. Smartling: Which Is Right for Enterprise Teams?
Both platforms can translate enterprise websites. The question isn't which one is better — it's which one fits how your team actually works. Here's the honest comparison most vendor pages won't give you.
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I’ll be upfront: I founded ConveyThis. So this comparison comes with a built-in bias I can’t fully erase. What I can do is tell the truth about where Smartling wins, where it doesn’t, and how to figure out which platform fits your team. If after reading this you decide Smartling is right for you, that’s a win for everyone — choosing the wrong enterprise translation software is one of the most expensive mistakes a localization team can make.
Both ConveyThis and Smartling sit in the enterprise tier of website translation platforms. Both offer translation memory, glossary control, multilingual SEO, API access, and compliance features. The differences live in pricing model, implementation philosophy, and what happens after the first six months — when most teams realize their initial assumptions about what they needed were wrong.
The 30-second answer
Pick Smartling if: You have a dedicated localization team of 5+ people, you manage translation across web, mobile apps, marketing collateral, and product docs simultaneously, you need deep workflow customization for a multi-step linguist + reviewer + approver pipeline, and your annual translation budget is comfortably above $80,000.
Pick ConveyThis if: Your priority is the website itself, you want fast time-to-launch (most enterprise customers go live in 4–6 weeks), you need server-side translation for SEO, and you want pricing that scales with content volume rather than translator seats.
That’s the headline. Below is the detail.
Side-by-side comparison
| Capability | ConveyThis | Smartling |
|---|---|---|
| Time to launch (mid-market site) | 2–6 weeks | 8–16 weeks |
| Pricing model | Word-volume + language tiers | Word-volume + per-seat licensing |
| Translation rendering | Server-side (SEO-friendly) | Server-side or proxy |
| Auto-detection of new content | Real-time crawl | Configurable (manual or scheduled) |
| Workflow customization | Standard linguist + reviewer flow | Highly customizable multi-step workflows |
| Glossary & TM control | Built-in | Industry-leading |
| Mobile app translation | Limited | Native support |
| Document & marketing collateral | No | Yes |
| Compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2) | Yes (Enterprise plan) | Yes |
| Self-service onboarding | Yes — install and run | Implementation services usually required |
| Typical annual cost (mid-enterprise) | $15K–$60K | $80K–$250K+ |
Pricing figures are based on publicly observable customer-reported ranges and our own enterprise tier. Smartling’s pricing varies significantly by contract; treat these as directional, not exact.
Where Smartling genuinely wins
Smartling has been in the enterprise localization space longer than ConveyThis. There are categories where that maturity matters.
Multi-channel localization beyond the web
If your team is translating a website, an iOS app, an Android app, in-product copy, support docs, marketing emails, and a quarterly print catalog — Smartling handles all of that in one platform. ConveyThis is purpose-built for websites. We integrate with mobile and document workflows through API, but we don’t pretend to be a one-stop translation hub for every asset class.
If your localization team needs a single source of truth across every surface where your brand speaks, Smartling is the cleaner answer.
Workflow customization for large linguist teams
Smartling’s workflow builder lets you define multi-step translation pipelines with conditional routing — something like “linguist A translates, in-country reviewer B approves, then if the content type is legal, reviewer C signs off, otherwise it auto-publishes.”
This level of customization matters when you have 20+ linguists, multiple agencies in the loop, and content that requires different handling depending on its type. ConveyThis offers a clean linguist + reviewer flow that covers 90% of enterprise needs, but if you live in the other 10%, Smartling fits better.
Mature integrations with TMS infrastructure
If you already use Phrase, memoQ, or Trados as your core TMS and you want a website translation layer that talks to them natively, Smartling has more polished integrations. We’re catching up here, but it’s an honest gap.
Where ConveyThis genuinely wins
Time to launch
Smartling implementations typically take 8–16 weeks for a mid-enterprise site. That includes integration work, workflow setup, glossary import, linguist onboarding, and QA cycles. The price tag usually includes professional services that charge against this timeline.
ConveyThis enterprise customers are usually live in 4–6 weeks. The shorter timeline isn’t because we cut corners — it’s because the platform handles content detection, hreflang, and rendering automatically. There’s less to configure, so there’s less to delay.
If you’re reading this in Q1 with a board commitment to launch three new languages by end of Q2, that timing difference isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the deal.
Server-side translation as the default
Both platforms can render translations server-side, but Smartling’s classic implementation often defaults to proxy-based delivery. Proxy works, but it adds a routing layer between your visitor and your content, which has implications for SEO, analytics attribution, and CDN caching.
ConveyThis renders translations server-side as the default architecture. AI search crawlers and Google’s crawler see the translated page as a first-class citizen, not a proxied derivative. For mid-market sites where SEO is a primary growth channel, this is meaningful.
Pricing that scales with content, not seats
Smartling charges per linguist seat in addition to translation volume. That’s fine when your linguist count is stable. It becomes painful when your team grows, when you bring in agency partners for a launch, or when you need to add reviewers seasonally.
ConveyThis prices on translated word volume and language count. Add as many internal reviewers, project managers, or stakeholder accounts as you need without the seat math. For teams that scale headcount unpredictably, this is the difference between predictable and surprise-billed.
Self-service that actually works
Smartling’s enterprise tier expects a kickoff with implementation services. That’s reasonable for the complexity it supports — but it’s also a barrier when you want to evaluate the platform yourself before committing.
ConveyThis lets enterprise prospects spin up a full sandbox, point it at a staging site, and see how their content gets translated and rendered without a sales call. We’ve had Fortune 500 teams complete the entire evaluation in two weeks because they could just try it.
How to actually decide
If your evaluation committee is split, the question I’d ask is this: what’s the primary translation problem you’re solving in the next 12 months?
If the answer is “unify localization across web, mobile, product, docs, and marketing assets,” Smartling is your shortest path. The platform is built for that scope.
If the answer is “get our website performing in 5–15 languages with SEO intact, fast, without a six-figure implementation,” ConveyThis is built for that. Most mid-enterprise teams I talk to fall into this second bucket — they have a website that’s been monolingual for too long, a Q2 launch deadline, and a CFO who wants the budget to be predictable.
There’s no shame in either choice. The mistake is picking the wrong tool for the wrong problem and spending nine months realizing it.
What we hear from teams who switched
We’ve onboarded a meaningful number of customers who came from Smartling. Their reasons cluster around three themes:
- Implementation overhead exceeded the value. The team was paying for capabilities they didn’t use, and renewal forced a hard look at whether the cost matched the actual workflow.
- Pricing predictability. Per-seat licensing made budgeting harder than expected, especially during agency-heavy launch periods.
- Speed. The team needed to add a new market in 6 weeks, and the existing platform wasn’t built for that pace.
Equally, we’ve had teams evaluate us and choose Smartling — because they needed mobile + docs + web in one platform, or because their localization workflow was too custom for our standard flow. Those decisions made sense too.
The right enterprise translation software isn’t the one with the longest feature list. It’s the one that matches the shape of your team’s work.
About the author
Alex Buran, Founder of ConveyThis
Alex has spent the last decade building infrastructure for multilingual websites. He writes about localization, AI search, and the technical side of going global.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alexburan
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