WPML vs Polylang vs TrueLang: What Three Years Actually Cost

Comparison posts usually stop at the sticker price, which is the least interesting number in the whole decision. A multilingual plugin is not a purchase, it is a subscription to a way of working, and the bill arrives in three parts: the licence, the translation itself, and your own time.

Three years is the right window. It is roughly how long a site runs before a redesign, and it is long enough for renewal terms and per-word charges to show their real shape.

All prices below were checked in September 2026 on the vendors' own pricing pages. They change, so verify before you commit. The currencies are quoted as each vendor displays them: WPML and Polylang in euros, TrueLang in dollars.

The licence prices, as published

WPML sells three tiers, all annual: Multilingual Blog at €39 for one production site, Multilingual CMS at €99 for three production sites, and Multilingual Agency at €199 for unlimited sites. Renewals come with a 25% discount as long as the account does not lapse.

For a shop, the entry tier is not the relevant one. WooCommerce and custom post types belong to the CMS tier, so a store is comparing against €99 a year, not €39.

Polylang has a capable free version on wordpress.org, and sells Polylang Pro from €99 a year excluding VAT, Polylang for WooCommerce from €99, and a Business Pack bundling both from €139. Renewals are half price.

TrueLang is a one-time payment, from $99, with no renewal. A $5 translation credit is included, and you can use your own AI API key instead.

So over three years, before a single word is translated:

| | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | |---|---|---|---|---| | WPML Multilingual CMS | €99 | €74.25 | €74.25 | €247.50 | | Polylang Business Pack | €139 | €69.50 | €69.50 | €278 | | TrueLang | $99 | $0 | $0 | $99 |

That table is real, and it is also the part that matters least.

Then you have to translate the words

This is where the three tools stop being comparable on price alone, because they are answering different questions.

WPML includes some automatic translation and then charges per word. Multilingual CMS comes with 22,500 AI words, Agency with 45,000, and the first 2,000 credits each month are free. Past that, the rate is volume-based: from €3.00 per 1,000 words down to €0.40 at the highest monthly volumes.

That pricing has a counterintuitive consequence worth knowing before you plan a project. Because the rate improves with monthly volume, translating your whole site in one go is substantially cheaper per word than spreading the same work over six months. Merchants who translate gradually, which feels prudent, pay the top of the range the whole way.

Take a 50,000-word store going into three languages. That is 150,000 words to translate. With the 22,500 included, roughly 127,500 words are chargeable, which lands somewhere between €51 and €383 depending entirely on how fast you run it.

Polylang does not sell translation. Polylang Pro integrates DeepL machine translation using your own DeepL API key, triggered per post from the language metabox. DeepL's free API tier covers 500,000 characters a month, and 150,000 words is roughly 900,000 characters, so a store of that size can be translated across two months at no cost at all.

The catch is not financial. It is that this is a per-item action: you open each post, product, page and taxonomy and trigger the translation. And the DeepL integration does not work with Elementor, which for a lot of stores rules it out entirely.

TrueLang translates the whole site automatically and stores the result in your own database. The included $5 credit covers a store of this size into two or three languages, and if you would rather not use credits at all, you point it at your own OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or Mistral key and pay the provider directly at cost.

The third cost, which is the one that actually bites

Your time does not appear on anyone's pricing page, and on this comparison it is the largest line by a wide margin.

With Polylang, translating 150,000 words means opening every item and triggering it. For a few hundred products, that is days of clicking, and it has to be repeated every time you add products. Polylang is excellent at managing languages. It was never designed to bulk-translate a catalogue.

With WPML, the Translation Management layer is genuinely powerful: translation jobs, translator roles, a queue, integration with professional translation services. If you work with human translators, that machinery is the product, and it is worth paying for. If you are one person with a catalogue and no translators, it is a system you configure and then mostly bypass.

There is also a structural cost specific to the duplication model. Both WPML and Polylang create a separate post for each language. Three languages means three or four times the rows in your posts and postmeta tables. That is not fatal, and plenty of large sites run it happily, but it makes backups heavier, migrations slower and some queries more expensive. If you ever leave, untangling those duplicates is its own project, which is why we wrote separately about migrating without losing your SEO.

The three-year picture for one store

Same scenario: a 50,000-word WooCommerce store, three target languages, some content added each year.

| | Licences (3 yrs) | Translation | Your time | |---|---|---|---| | WPML CMS | €247.50 | €51 to €383, plus new content | Setup, then largely automatic | | Polylang Business | €278 | €0 with DeepL's free tier | Per item, every item, repeatedly | | TrueLang | $99 | $5 included, then cents, or your own API key | One run |

The gap in the first column is real but small in absolute terms: a couple of hundred euros over three years is not what decides a business. The gap in the second and third columns is what people actually feel.

Where WPML and Polylang are the better answer

An honest comparison has to include the cases where we lose, and there are several.

You work with human translators. WPML's translation management, translator accounts and job workflow have no equivalent here. If a professional translator is in your process, WPML is built for exactly that and TrueLang is not.

You want full editorial control per language. Duplication has a real advantage: a translated post is a post. You can give it a different title, a different featured image, a different structure, or content that exists only in German. If your German site should be different from your French site rather than a translation of it, the duplication model is the right one.

You only need language management. If you are translating everything by hand anyway, Polylang's free version costs nothing and does that job well. Adding an AI plugin on top would be solving a problem you do not have.

You need something specific and ancient. WPML has been around long enough that almost every theme and plugin has been tested against it. That compatibility surface is worth something, and it is not a claim a newer plugin can make as loudly.

Where the honest recommendation lands

If your site is content you wrote once and want readable in several languages, and you do not have translators on staff, paying an annual licence plus per-word credits for the rest of the site's life is a poor shape for the problem. You are renting access to pages you already own.

If you have an editorial team producing genuinely different content per market, or human translators in the loop, WPML earns its subscription and Polylang earns its place.

The question that separates them is not price. It is whether translation for you is a project that finishes, or a process that keeps running. If it finishes, pay once. If it keeps running, pay for the machinery that runs it.

And if you want the arithmetic on the translation itself rather than the licences, we broke that down in how much website translation costs.