Is Immersive Translate free?

It has a capable free tier for basic webpage translation; advanced AI models and some formats require a Pro subscription. If you mainly read web pages in a browser, the free tier may be all you need.

Can Immersive Translate work outside the browser?

It's a browser extension at heart — web pages and some document viewers it ships. Native apps like Preview, Word, Slack or your reference manager's PDF reader are outside its reach. That's the gap a system-wide Mac app fills.

Do I need translation or explanation?

If you want the whole page in your first language, you want translation — Immersive Translate is built for that. If you're reading in the original language and get stuck on individual terms, you want an in-context explanation — faster, and better for language learning.

Can I use both together?

Yes — they cover different surfaces. Immersive Translate for long-form bilingual web reading; PopGloss for term-level lookups anywhere on the Mac, especially PDFs and native apps.

Immersive Translate alternative for Mac readers: beyond the browser

Immersive Translate is great for bilingual web pages, but browser-only. PopGloss explains selected text in any Mac app: PDFs, Word, Slack. $10 once.

Key takeaways

Immersive Translate is the best-known bilingual webpage tool — but it's browser-only
PopGloss covers the rest of your Mac: PDFs in Preview/Skim/Zotero, Word docs, Slack, terminals
Different answers too: full-page translation vs. 1–3 sentence in-context explanation of what you selected
Pricing differs: Pro subscription vs. $10 once for 1,000 never-expiring credits
Honest verdict: use both — they barely overlap

The short answer

If your reading happens mostly on web pages and you want them fully bilingual, Immersive Translate is the right tool — it's excellent at that job. If your reading happens in PDFs, Word documents, Slack messages and other native Mac apps — or you want to understand terms without leaving the original language — PopGloss is the alternative that covers what it can't.

Where Immersive Translate genuinely wins

Bilingual webpage reading. Side-by-side paragraph translation on any site is its flagship feature, and it's very good.
Free tier is generous. Basic translation needs no payment.
Ebook and subtitle support. EPUB translation and video subtitle translation are real strengths.

For long-form web reading in your browser, it's the default recommendation for a reason.

The boundary: browsers end somewhere

A large share of serious reading never touches a browser:

Papers and books: Preview, Skim, Zotero's reader, Apple Books
Work documents: Word, Pages, email clients
Team knowledge: Slack, Notion desktop, issue trackers in native apps
Developer surfaces: terminals, IDEs, documentation apps

A browser extension can't follow you there. PopGloss is a native menu bar app: select text anywhere — any app with selectable text — and the explanation appears next to the selection.

Translation vs. explanation

The second difference is what you get back:

	Immersive Translate	PopGloss
Answer	Whole paragraph in your first language	1–3 sentences: what the selection means, in context, in the language you're reading
Best moment	"I want to read this whole page comfortably"	"This one term is blocking my sentence"
Language learning	Passive — you read the translation	Active — you stay in the original and learn the term's real usage
Flow cost	Low (page is pre-translated)	Lowest (2–3 seconds, in place)

For readers working on their second language, staying in the original text matters: every translated paragraph is vocabulary you didn't acquire. (We wrote about this in reading papers in a second language.)

Pricing, honestly

Immersive Translate: free tier + Pro subscription for advanced models and formats.
PopGloss: 10 free credits, then $10 once for 1,000 credits that never expire. At typical reading volume (20 lookups/day), that's one to three months per pack — no recurring charge.

If you dislike subscriptions on principle, that's the structural difference. If you translate heavily every day, a subscription may genuinely be the better deal — do the math for your volume.

The honest bottom line

Choose Immersive Translate if your reading is mostly web pages and you want them bilingual.
Choose PopGloss if your reading lives in native Mac apps, or you want term-level understanding without leaving the original language.
Use both if you do both kinds of reading — they share almost no surface area.

Try it yourself: Download PopGloss — 10 free credits included, never expire.