Unbabel
Translation for customer service and content: machine translation scored by AI, human editors where needed, inside your help desk
Enterprise
Decision snapshot
Fast-read signals for fit, pricing, and trust.
- Category
- Email & Communication
- Best for
- ai translation tool
- Pricing
- Enterprise
What is this tool?
Support organisations answering customers in many languages get translation inside the help desk they already run, with human editors brought in only where the quality model scores a translation low. The buying model is the constraint to weigh: Unbabel's site publishes no price, plan or trial, Unbabel sets up each customer's accounts itself after a sales conversation, and subscriptions renew automatically for equal periods unless 90 days' written notice is given.
By QT Desk
Read full overviewHide full overview
Buying starts with a demo request or a conversation with Unbabel's team. Once a customer joins, Unbabel sets up the first user of the company's Customer Portal, which sits at the customer's own unbabel.com subdomain and can use single sign-on arranged through the account team; further users are invited by an owner, admin or LangOps user, or by Unbabel. The help centre says the stand-alone chat interface has no option to create an account: agents use credentials Unbabel issues. Teams then connect a help-desk integration or the API, or submit document projects in the Portal, and machine translation, quality estimation and editor review run according to each pipeline's settings.
Unbabel's customer terms set out three ways to buy: pilots, short projects for a one-time fee; subscriptions, a periodic fixed fee that can vary, agreed in a Statement of Work; and self-service pay-as-you-go, paid in units. Billing terms live in each customer's Master Services Agreement or Statement of Work, and the website states no monthly or annual price. A subscription includes a set number of units, and units used beyond it, or applied as a fair-usage penalty, are charged on top. Self-service units are valid for 365 days and then expire without compensation. Subscriptions renew automatically for periods of equal length unless either side gives 90 days' written notice, and late payment lets Unbabel suspend the service.
Under the terms, customers keep the rights in what they submit and receive the rights in the translations once Unbabel is paid in full; a Master Services Agreement or Statement of Work overrides the terms where they conflict. Unbabel states ISO 27001 certification, GDPR and CCPA compliance and a Data Processing Agreement with customers, and encrypts data in transit (TLS 1.2 and 1.3) and at rest (AES-256). Content is stored on EU and US servers, Unbabel says it does not sell personal data, and its privacy policy lists third-party AI providers among its machine-translation processors.
Is this right for you?
Quick fit check against how you actually work.
Choose this if
- Your support team works in Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom or another documented connector and needs chats and tickets translated where agents already work
- You want machine translation by default and human editors only where a quality score says the output needs them
- Your procurement expects a contracted service with a Data Processing Agreement, ISO 27001 and data held on EU and US servers
- Different markets or content types need different speed, quality and cost settings
Consider alternatives if
- You want to try a translation tool before speaking to sales; Unbabel's website offers no free plan or trial, and Unbabel creates the accounts itself
- You need a published per-word or monthly price; Unbabel's site and customer terms leave pricing to the sales conversation and the contract
- You translate occasional documents as an individual rather than buying a contracted, integrated service
- You need a desktop or mobile app; Unbabel's site and help centre describe browser-based tools, integrations and an API, and name no app
- You cannot commit to giving 90 days' written notice before a subscription renews
Key features
What you can actually do with this tool.
A quality score on every translation
AI quality estimation predicts the quality of each machine translation and decides whether it meets the bar or needs human review; lower-scoring translations are reviewed and refined by Unbabel's global community of editors.
Pipelines set for speed, quality and cost
Pipeline Builder sets the speed, quality and cost parameters each translation pipeline runs with, so a team chooses where human review is worth paying for.
Translation where agents already work
Documented connectors cover Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Intercom, Helpshift, Wix Answers and Kustomer, translating live chat in real time as well as tickets and help-centre content. A stand-alone web interface translates chat with no installation, and an asynchronous API connects other systems.
Documents and added services
Document projects accept common formats such as csv, docx, json, pptx, srt and strings, and the demo page says over 50 file types; services such as desktop publishing and subtitling can be added.
Usage reported in units
The Customer Portal reports usage in Unbabel units or in currency, with up to 24 hours' delay, and shows portal owners past invoices; on accounts where project estimation is enabled, the estimate is the most a project will cost.
Integrations
Tools and platforms this connects with.
Salesforce Service CloudSalesforce Live AgentSalesforce Knowledge BaseZendesk Support / Agent WorkspaceZendesk GuideZendesk ChatFreshdeskFreshchatIntercomHelpshiftWix AnswersKustomer
Frequently asked
Common questions about this tool, answered.
What does Unbabel cost, and is there a trial?
Unbabel's website publishes no prices, rates or plans; buyers are routed to a demo or a sales conversation, and billing is set in each customer's contract, whether a one-time pilot fee, a fixed periodic subscription or self-service units. The website and help centre offer no free plan or trial; Unbabel provisions accounts after a customer joins.
How many languages does Unbabel cover?
Unbabel states this two ways. Its demo page says 'over 6000+ language pairs', while its customer help centre says it supports more than 30 languages and local variants making up hundreds of language pair combinations. The two figures are not reconciled, so confirm the specific language pairs and pipelines you need with Unbabel.
Does Unbabel use my content to train its models?
Its customer terms grant Unbabel a worldwide, royalty-free licence to store and use both the source content and the translations, including to improve its products and machine-learning technology. Its security page adds that personal data is removed and tokenised before any machine or human translation, so neither sees it, and that the data used to train its engines is anonymised. A customer's own contract can set different terms and prevails where the two conflict.