DeepL
Translation for documents and text across 30-plus languages that keeps the original formatting, plus a rewriting tool that adjusts tone and clarity in English.
What you'd use it for
Translating a document or piece of business correspondence into another language while keeping the original layout intact.
- Translate a Word, PDF or PowerPoint file and get it back with the same tables, headings and formatting
- Build a glossary so product names and legal terms translate the way you decided, not however the model guesses
- Translate pasted text instantly across 30-plus languages in the browser, desktop app or mobile app
- Call the API from your own product or workflow to translate content at scale
- Rewrite English text for tone and clarity with DeepL Write, included on paid plans
The verdict
The correct default for translating anything that has to leave the business looking finished, because it returns the document rather than a block of text. The real cost is not the headline price but the metering underneath it, which gates characters, file counts and glossary entries separately, so a plan that looks sufficient on paper is often not the one that survives a week of real use. It suits a business that translates documents as a routine part of the job, not one translating a sentence occasionally.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | €7.49 per month, billed annually | One person translating occasional documents and correspondence. | 300,000 characters a month, 3 file translations a month, 1 glossary, full-page translation. |
| Team | €24.99 per user/month, billed annually | A team where several people translate as part of the job. | 1,000,000 characters per user a month, 20 file translations, bulk file translation, 5 glossaries, team administration, SSO. |
| Business | €49.99 per user/month, billed annually | Businesses where translation is operational rather than occasional. | Unlimited characters, 100 file translations a month, translation memory, unlimited glossaries, SCIM provisioning, 99.0% availability, Write Pro included. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Organisations with volume, residency or integration requirements. | Customisable limits, bring your own key, 99.9% availability, dedicated account team. |
Read from DeepL's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An email, Google or Apple account to sign up
- No credit card for the free translator tier, but a card is required to activate even the free API key
- A Pro subscription for document translation beyond one file a month, a second glossary, or API access at volume
A few minutes to a working free account and a first pasted-text translation. Getting an API key working takes a card on file first; document translation at any real volume needs the Pro plan active.
Your first run Sign up with an email, Google or Apple account and you are translating pasted text within a few minutes. A full document with formatting preserved needs a Pro plan, since the free tier allows only one file translation a month.
Where it breaks
There is a free tier, but it is capped tightly enough that anyone translating real documents will hit it in the first week. All the headline prices are annual-billing figures; monthly billing costs more. The Individual plan allows only three file translations a month, which is the limit most people actually run into rather than the character count. And the glossary — the feature that stops it mistranslating your product names — is limited to one entry list on the cheapest paid tier. The figures above are in Euros: deepl.com/en/pro geo-served EUR on every attempt, including an /en-us/ path, and the page exposes no currency selector to force USD. Check the live pricing page from a US connection for the dollar figure.
Browser, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android, browser extensions, and an API. The desktop app is the practical one — it translates whatever you have selected anywhere on the machine, which is faster than a round trip to a website.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for someone translating a handful of sentences now and then, where the free tier or a general assistant already covers it without a subscription. Not for anyone who needs a translation checked for register, tone or local convention rather than plain correctness, since DeepL will not tell you a headline reads wrong to a native speaker.
Translation is one of the few places where the AI question has a settled answer, and DeepL is it for most European business language pairs.
The reason is formatting as much as fluency. Dropping a contract or a product sheet into a general assistant returns text; dropping it into DeepL returns the same document, with the same tables, headings and numbering, in another language. For anything that has to be sent to a customer rather than read internally, that difference is the entire job.
What you are paying for
- Characters. The tiers are metered by volume, and the jump from 300,000 to a million per user is the main reason to move up.
- Glossaries. Your product names, your legal terms, translated the way you decided rather than the way a model guessed. This is the feature that makes output usable without a native speaker rechecking it.
- Document count. Three file translations a month on the entry plan is genuinely restrictive.
What it will not do
It will not tell you whether a translation is appropriate — register, formality, local convention. For a marketing headline going out under your name in a language nobody in the business reads, DeepL gets you a correct draft and a human gets you a safe one.
For general writing and tone work in English, Grammarly sits closer to that job than DeepL’s own rewriting tool does.
Alternatives
Writing & editingAppsSmartling
A translation platform combining machine translation with human review and a company's own glossary, for businesses that publish in more than one language on an ongoing basis.
Phrase
A localisation platform that runs machine translation through a quality-scoring layer, so a team can see which translated strings are safe to ship and which need a human.
Writing & editingAppsWeglot
Translates an entire website into other languages with one code snippet, keeping each translated version indexable by search engines.
Writing & editingAppsGrammarly
An AI writing assistant that lives inside the apps you already type in, correcting and rewriting as you go rather than waiting for you to paste something into a chat box.
Get DeepL
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.