Krendo vs Immersive Translate: a May 2026 comparison

Both Krendo and Immersive Translate translate the web. They serve different goals. This piece is for people who are deciding between them — especially anyone who is trying Krendo after Immersive Translate’s recent free-tier changes.

I’m the developer of Krendo, so the comparison isn’t neutral. What I can promise is that it’s accurate: every claim about Immersive Translate below is sourced from their public documentation or recent Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-on reviews, not from my characterization of them. Where Immersive Translate is the better tool for a given person, I’ll say so.

What each one is, in one paragraph

Immersive Translateis a translation-first browser extension. Its signature feature is bilingual paragraph rendering — the original text on top, the translation underneath, in the actual document flow. It supports 20+ translation engines (DeepL, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, plus its own GLM-4 Flash model). It translates PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube and Netflix subtitles, and images. The free tier requires a login for higher quota; Pro is $6.90/month for 20M tokens, Pro+ for 50M tokens with premium engines.

Krendois a vocabulary-first browser extension. You select a word while reading, press Ctrl + Space (Control + Space on Mac), and an inline overlay shows the translation, dictionary entry, and a Save button. Saved words keep the sentence they came from and a link back to the source. Later you review them in 30-second exercises — flashcard, multiple choice, or self-rate — and watch them progress from new to learning to stronger as you remember them. There is no account, no subscription, no cloud: your saved vocabulary lives in your browser, on your device.

When Immersive Translate is the right choice

• You want bilingual side-by-side reading on long articles.Their paragraph-by-paragraph rendering on articles, PDFs, and EPUBs is the most-praised feature in the category and Krendo doesn’t do it. If most of your reading is full-length articles you want to consume in two languages at once, Immersive Translate is the right tool.
• You want to pick between many translation engines. Immersive lets you switch between DeepL, Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, and others, per page. If a given paragraph reads strangely, you flip the engine and try again. Krendo uses Google Translate today; multi-engine support is on the roadmap but not shipping yet.
• You want to translate video subtitles, images, or EPUBs.Immersive does this, plus Netflix and YouTube bilingual subtitles. Krendo doesn’t do any of this and isn’t planning to — Language Reactor is the deep player in that lane.
• You’re happy to pay $6.90/month for higher quality. The Pro plan is, by most reports, a good product if you use it heavily.

When Krendo is the right choice

• You want a free tool that will stay free. We commit, in writing in our public architecture decisions, to never paywall the translate-save-review loop. If paid tiers ever ship in a future version, they will cover things that cost money per user (cloud sync, hosted backup), not the features that exist today.
• You don’t want an account. Krendo requires nothing. You install the extension, you start translating. There is no email collection, no quota, no profile, no Pro upsell modal.
• You want translated words to become vocabulary you save and review later.This is Krendo’s center. Every translation can become a saved word with one click; every saved word keeps its sentence and source URL. The review loop — new to learning to stronger — is built in. Immersive Translate doesn’t do this; it translates and moves on.
• You use Anki and want easy capture from web reading. Krendo exports to .apkg directly. You filter your library to a tag, a status, a date range, or a list, and hit Export. The .apkg imports straight into Anki with the word on the front, the sentence as context, the translation and dictionary entry on the back, and your tags carried over.
• You care about where your data lives.Your saved words sit in your browser’s IndexedDB. We have no server with a copy. No analytics SDK ships with the extension. The translation request itself goes to Google’s public endpoint with no identifier attached. Read our privacy notes for the long version.

Feature comparison

Limitedmeans a feature is available but constrained — for Immersive Translate’s “free tier” entry, the constraint is that the historically-free Google and Bing engines were removed for free users in early 2026 and replaced with their in-house GLM-4 Flash model; a login is required to lift the daily-translation cap.

What Krendo doesn’t try to do

Some of these are roadmap, some are deliberately off the table. I want to be explicit about which is which.

• Bilingual side-by-side reading. Not on the roadmap. Immersive Translate is the canonical product in this lane and they do it well; the right way to use both tools is to use Immersive when you want to read a long article bilingually, and Krendo when you want a word to become vocabulary.
• Multiple translation engines. On the roadmap (multi-engine plus bring-your-own-key for DeepL or an LLM provider). The single-engine fragility is a real risk and we acknowledge it openly in our architecture notes.
• Video subtitle translation.Not on the roadmap. Language Reactor and Trancy own that category; competing on it would be years of work for a feature we don’t need to ship to be valuable.
• AI grammar explanations and conversation tutors. Not on the roadmap. The Chrome Web Store language category is full of AI-tutor extensions; Krendo is deliberately a tool, not a tutor. If we ever ship AI features they would be opt-in and supplemental, never the centerpiece.
• Cloud sync between devices.Not on the roadmap for v1.x. If it ever ships, it will be opt-in — local-only is the default and stays the default. The lack of sync is the trade-off for the rest of the local-first guarantees.

Why “no account, no subscription” is a written commitment, not a current state

The most common reason language tools get worse over time is the same reason most consumer software gets worse over time: somebody decides a feature that was free needs to be paid, or an account is needed for “personalization,” and users wake up to find their tool has shifted under them. The category is full of recent examples.

Krendo’s answer is to put the commitment in writing, publicly, before there’s any pressure to walk it back. We keep an architectural decisions log in the repository; one of those decisions, ADR-0015, says explicitly that the translate-save-review loop will not be paywalled and that the extension will not require an account in v1.x. Any future paid tier — if there is one — will be a separate Phase 3 cloud service that covers things which actually cost money per user, not features that exist today.

That commitment is the differentiator. Not the feature list.

Trying it

Krendo is free and open in the Chrome Web Store. If you read in a foreign language and want your reading to compound into vocabulary you actually remember, give it a few days. If after that Immersive Translate is the better fit for what you actually do, that’s a fine outcome — the worst case is you spent 30 seconds installing something and learned what kind of tool you actually wanted.

Last updated 2026-05-22. We’ll re-date this post when either tool ships changes that affect the comparison.