# Kagi Translate

50 Hacker News commenters recommended Kagi Translate and 26 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Shoppers like its multiple translations, formality control and fun output styles. Common caveat: recent limits or extra charges on the translate feature.

## Why people recommend it

- Fun, funny output styles (9 comments): "Always good to see sophisticated humour like this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409588)) "Try the "Reddit speak", it's actually pretty good." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409611)) "Otherwise, pretty cool and funny project!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409831))
- Strong translation quality overall (6 comments): "you can use services like Kagi Translate or DeepL to see the evidence for yourself that they make excellent translations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45987537)) "Kagi translate is superior to Google translate, also." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006476)) "kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390816))
- Useful for corporate speak (4 comments): "I chose "Telling you how it is cut the crap" and fed it some corp speak from other comments and it did pretty well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409762)) "I am putting it to my bookmarks for responding to daily corporate crap" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411409)) "This would save me a lot of time translating politicians" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409441))
- Frequently used by subscribers (4 comments): "I use Translate, Assistant, Universal Summarizer, and (of course) Search multiple times a day." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46001958)) "their Translate (which I use quite often while I'm learning German/working in German" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424733)) "nowadays I’m very happy with Kagi translate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103731))

## What people warn about

- Translate access limited or extra cost (4 comments): "I'm more bewildered that they've limited our service as paying customers, restricting Kagi Translate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650611)) "I'd rather not double my monthly subscription just to have (usable)access to kagi translate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647729)) "I expect some amount of translation access as part of my Kagi subscription." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48780344))
- Slow, buggy, or unreliable at times (4 comments): "it is kind of fiddly and needs refreshing a few times" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411065)) "Which is a very bad translation! unfortunately it looks like the API is somewhat unreliable at the moment" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410585)) "consistently dog slow (paid account) compared to google translate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47430728))
- Thin wrapper around an LLM (3 comments): "Kagi's implementation just looks like a cheap magic trick once you look behind the curtain." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424749)) "It is just a proooomt. Any shitty LLM can do this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409337)) "it’s a fairly trivial wrapper around an LLM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414565))
- Weaker in reverse translation (2 comments): "Slightly disappointed that translating in the opposite direction doesn’t mention ass at all, much less 5000 times." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409640)) "It is bad at reverse direction though" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409291))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Google Translate](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-translate.md): 64 recommend
- [Firefox Translations](https://hackerapproved.com/p/firefox-translations.md): 26 recommend
- [DeepL Translator](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepl.md): 25 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://translate.kagi.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Kagi Translate", https://hackerapproved.com/p/kagi-translate/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).