Weglot vs GTranslate vs building your own: the honest build-vs-buy
The two big translation SaaS tools, and the third option nobody benchmarks them against, a custom engine. Compared on SEO, quality, and cost at scale, from someone who built one for 91,000 pages.
MULTILINGUAL SEO, THE FULL PICTURE →For most sites, Weglot. It is the easiest way to ship a translated site that is actually SEO-correct. GTranslate is cheaper, but only on its paid indexable plan, the free widget is invisible to Google. A custom engine wins once you hit scale or need control over translation quality and cost, and LLMs like Claude and DeepL have moved that crossover earlier than it used to be.
Independent comparison. Last reviewed June 2026.
Side by side
The verdict
There is no single winner, only a crossover point. Below a few thousand pages, buy: Weglot gets you SEO-correct multilingual fast, and the recurring bill is worth not building anything. Pay for GTranslate only if budget is tight and you take the indexable plan, never ship the free widget and expect to rank. Above a few thousand pages, or when you want DeepL-or-Claude translation quality and predictable cost, build: a custom engine ships translated HTML at build time with no runtime dependency and no per-word meter. LLMs pulled that crossover earlier, owning the pipeline is now cheaper and better than it was two years ago.
Pick each one when
- Weglot: a small-to-mid site that needs to be multilingual and SEO-correct this week, and you would rather pay than build.
- GTranslate (paid): budget is the constraint, you understand the free widget does nothing for SEO, and the paid indexable plan covers your languages.
- Custom engine: thousands of pages, many languages, or a need to control translation quality (DeepL/Claude + humanization) and cost. This is where I live.
Frequently asked questions
Is Weglot or GTranslate better?
For most teams, Weglot. It is SEO-correct out of the box: proper hreflang, localized URLs, and editable translations, so it ranks without you thinking about it. GTranslate is cheaper, but only its paid indexable plan does anything for SEO. If you are comparing the free GTranslate widget to Weglot, they are not in the same category, the free widget does not get indexed at all.
Is GTranslate good for SEO?
Only on a paid plan that creates real indexable subdirectories with hreflang. The free GTranslate widget translates client-side in the browser, so search engines never see or index the translated pages. If SEO is the goal, budget for the paid tier or use Weglot.
When should I build a custom i18n engine instead?
When you are at real scale (thousands of pages or many languages) or you need control over translation quality and cost. SaaS pricing is per-word and per-language, so it climbs with your content; a custom engine is a bigger upfront build but cheap to run. The crossover is usually a few thousand pages. I built one that runs 91,000 pages across 30 languages.
Can I translate with DeepL or Claude instead of Google Translate?
Yes, and at scale you should. DeepL and LLMs like Claude produce noticeably more natural output than the Google Translate that powers GTranslate. A custom engine lets you pick the translator and add a humanization pass; the SaaS tools mostly lock you to their built-in machine translation. See my guide on translating a website with AI.
Does Weglot hurt site speed?
The proxy and snippet add some overhead, and a third-party dependency in the critical path. For a small site it is negligible; at scale, the latency and the per-word bill are two more reasons teams move to a build-time custom engine that ships translated HTML with no runtime dependency.
Going multilingual?
I build and run multilingual sites at scale, the engine, the hreflang, the humanization, all of it. If you are weighing build vs buy for a real content estate, the multilingual SEO overview covers the full picture, or book a call and I will size it for your site.