Shopify writes the tags
Translated pages are Markets subfolders on your own domain. hreflang, canonicals and the language picker come from Shopify, so there is nothing for the app to get wrong.
Transcy alternative
A Transcy alternative that doesn’t argue with Shopify Markets
When a translation app writes its own hreflang and canonical tags on top of Shopify Markets, your store gives two answers to the same question and Google has to pick one. Lingomatic publishes into Shopify and lets Markets own the SEO — the tags, the subfolders and the URLs you already rank for.
- Shopify owns hreflang
- URL handles untouched
- Words, not tokens
URL handlesUntouched
Same handle, every market
English
/products/merino-base-layerDeutsch
/de/products/merino-base-layerFrançais
/fr/products/merino-base-layerhreflang & canonical
Generated by Shopify Markets. The app writes none of its own.
Handle translation is off unless you switch it on
In their words
The complaints that repeat
Transcy holds 4.5 stars across 2,595 reviews, and the five-star page is largely gratitude for fast human support. Read the low-star pages instead and three subjects dominate: what the app does to search rankings, what updates do to a live store, and what the bill does on its own.
“The app generated hundreds of ‘743 Hreflang Conflicts,’ confusing Google by trying to host multiple languages on the same URL without proper subfolder mapping… It fights with native Shopify Markets settings rather than working with them.”
“3 Monate SEO-Arbeit für uns ruiniert. Achtung: diese App setzt canonical Tags und dadurch wurden wir bei Google abgestraft.” — Three months of our SEO work ruined. Warning: this app sets canonical tags and Google penalised us for it.
“they increase my monthly price from 30 usd to 60 usd without notification.”
Quoted verbatim and anonymised — store names left out on purpose. Read the one-star reviews on Transcy’s listing ↗
Who owns your SEO
One source of truth, not two
Shopify Markets already serves each language from its own subfolder and writes the hreflang and canonical tags to match. An app that adds a second set has to agree with the first one perfectly, forever, through every Shopify release. Not adding them is the safer design.
Your handles stay put
Translating a URL handle changes the address of a page you may already rank for. Lingomatic leaves handles alone unless you deliberately turn handle translation on.
Nothing injected
No snippet in your theme, no client-side swap, no markup to remove afterwards. Translations are published into Shopify and served by Shopify.
Shopify documents how this works in its multilingual SEO guide. It is worth reading before you let any app take the job over.
Pricing
Tokens are a unit you can’t estimate in
Transcy’s paid tiers carry a monthly allowance of AI tokens — 150 on Local Plus at $14.90, 300 on Regional at $29, 500 on Continental at $69 — alongside caps on how many languages you may edit. A token is not a thing you can count in your own catalogue, so nobody can tell in advance whether an allowance covers their store.
Lingomatic meters credits, and one credit is one word of Standard translation. You can count that yourself, and the app counts it for you before anything runs: every job shows its estimate first. Imports, duplicates, draft and archived products and unchanged content are free, there is no overage and no automatic upgrade, and packs do not expire.
Basic
Free
10,000 credits · 2 languages · 100 products
Growth
$19/mo
50,000 credits · 5 languages · 500 products
Pro
$49/mo
200,000 credits · unlimited languages and products
Glossary and do-not-translate rules are unlimited on every plan, free one included — they are not a tier you upgrade into.
When Transcy is the right call
Transcy does language, currency, geolocation switching and image localisation from one app. Lingomatic does not touch currency at all — Shopify Markets does that natively, and we think that is the right place for it, but if you want one dashboard and one bill for all of it, Transcy covers ground we do not.
Its support is also, by the evidence of its own five-star page, fast and genuinely helpful once you reach a person. And Transcy has 2,595 reviews behind it. Lingomatic launched in March 2026 and has almost none — that is a fair thing to hold against us, and no page we write can argue it away.
FAQ
Switching from Transcy: the questions merchants ask
Does Lingomatic add its own hreflang or canonical tags?
No. Your translated storefronts are Shopify Markets subfolders, so Shopify generates the hreflang and canonical tags for them. There is no second set of tags from the app to conflict with Shopify’s, which is what produces hreflang conflicts and canonical surprises when an app handles them itself.
Will translated pages show up in Google as duplicate products?
No new products or pages are created. Lingomatic translates the content of the products you already have, and leaves URL handles untouched by default, so each product keeps one URL per market with Shopify’s own hreflang pointing between them.
What is a credit, in plain terms?
One credit is one word of Standard translation. Premium adds an independent editing pass on eligible long-form text at 1.5 credits per word, and image translation costs 750 credits per rendered image per language. You see the exact estimate before a job runs, and there is no overage and no automatic upgrade.
Does Lingomatic convert currencies too?
No. Shopify Markets already handles market pricing and currency natively, so Lingomatic does language and images only. If you want language, currency and a geolocation switcher from one app, that is a genuine reason to choose Transcy instead.
What happens to my theme translations when I push a theme update?
Pushing to your live theme can make Shopify quietly drop translations registered against theme keys — nothing errors, the language still reports as complete, and the first sign is a shopper reading your source language. Lingomatic watches for theme updates, asks Shopify which of your published keys are still there, and republishes the ones that went missing, at no credit cost.
Can I import what Transcy already translated?
Only the part of it that was published into Shopify’s own translation layer. Anything Transcy renders through its injected snippet is not in Shopify, so there is nothing to import. Run a sync before you uninstall anything and look at coverage per language — that tells you exactly what came across and what has to be redone.
Keep reading
Shopify translation apps compared
Eight apps, what each one meters you on, and who owns your hreflang. Our own row included.
Read it →Switching without losing your translations
How to tell whether your next move is an import or a re-translation — before you uninstall anything.
Read it →Weglot alternative
DNS records, word counts that climb, and billing that outlives the install.
Read it →Start free
Check it against your own store, not against a table
Basic is free forever: 10,000 credits a month, 2 languages, 100 products, no card. Sync your store and look at what actually came across before you change anything.