This post is part of a series on moving off American software.
Google Translate is free, instant, and preinstalled into half the web. It is also an American service, and text you translate passes through Google's infrastructure. For a menu in Rome, nobody is worried. For business documents, customer emails, or anything sensitive, it is worth knowing what the European options actually do.
The honest summary up front: no service in this post matches Google's sheer language coverage, and this post will not pretend otherwise. Where these four compete is translation quality, and in features Google does not offer. Here they are.
DeepL: quality first
DeepL is a translator service that stands out for its very good translation quality. That is the headline, and it is the reason DeepL became the default suggestion whenever someone asks for a Google Translate alternative.
It does not support as many languages as Google Translate — that is the trade-off, stated plainly. But new languages are added all the time, and there are already so many that for most common language pairs you are unlikely to run into its limits. If you translate between major European languages, DeepL is the strongest general-purpose substitute on this list.
Reverso: more than translation
Reverso is a machine translation service from France. Translation is only part of what it does: it also offers a grammar checker and tools to find synonyms and conjugate words.
That combination makes it useful in a different way than the others. When you are writing in a foreign language rather than just reading one — an email, a message, a short text — checking grammar and looking up conjugations in the same place as the translation is genuinely convenient. Google Translate translates what you wrote; it will not tell you your sentence was wrong.
ModernMT: it learns from you
ModernMT is a translation service from Italy, and it has two characteristics that set it apart. It improves from corrections, so it adapts to how you translate rather than staying static. And it adapts to the context of the whole document, not just the last sentence — which matters for anything longer than a paragraph, where context is what separates a passable translation from a good one.
The parent company, Translated, is also based in Italy. It offers human-reviewed translation and access to the machine translation API. So if a text matters enough to warrant a human pass, you can move from machine output to reviewed output within the same company's tooling.
Supertext: files and business use
Supertext is a Swiss AI translation service. It handles simple text input, but also editable files and PDFs — which covers the common real-world case of being handed a document rather than a sentence. It also offers custom translation solutions for businesses.
If your translation needs are less "what does this sign say" and more "translate this PDF for a Swiss client," this is the one oriented toward that job.
What you give up
To be direct: Google Translate covers more languages than any of these services, and for rare language pairs it may be the only practical free option. It is also baked into browsers and phones in a way none of these match.
The reasonable way to switch is not all-or-nothing. Use DeepL for day-to-day translations between major languages, Reverso when you are writing rather than reading, ModernMT when document-wide context matters, and Supertext when the input is a file or the job is a business one. For the long tail of language pairs, you can keep Google Translate in your back pocket without making it your default.
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