What's New at Crowdin: September 2025

This September release is packed with updates that make Crowdin more powerful, secure, and adaptable to how teams work today. The highlight is Vector Cloud, a new app that takes AI translations to the next level by grounding them in your own data. We’re also shipping a major upgrade to the Crowdin Plugin for Figma, several security-focused improvements like session timeout settings and stricter API token management, and new ways to support hourly-based payments with time logging and reporting.

Introducing Vector Cloud: Next-Generation Context for AI Translation

We’re excited to announce Vector Cloud, a new app that helps you adjust how AI accesses your translation assets to improve the expected translation quality.

The Problem with Traditional Matching

Our industry and Crowdin’s native AI integration use RAG to pull relevant glossary terms and translation memory segments based on traditional fuzzy matching. However, this approach has limitations: segments below certain match thresholds (such as 10% matches) are excluded from AI prompts, even though they still contain 10% information about the kind of translations your company expects.

How Vector Cloud is Different

Vector Cloud uses semantic vector search instead of traditional fuzzy matching. Rather than looking for exact string similarities, it understands the meaning of your content and retrieves contextually relevant examples – even when there’s no obvious string overlap. This means AI learns much more about what translations work for your specific organization.

Beyond Translation Memory

Vector Cloud supports multiple content sources:

• Automatic sync with your TMs and Glossaries.
• Non-parallel content: Upload monolingual reference materials in your target languages (style guides, marketing copy, product docs).
• We plan to have an API that allows you to sync any type of content to the vector database. This might help AI show what kind of copy is acceptable in your company.

For example, if you have French content that isn’t a translation – just how your company communicates in French earlier – Vector Cloud uses it to help AI understand your brand’s voice, terminology, and style.

Proven Results

Our earlier research showed measurable quality improvements when using vector databases for translation. Vector Cloud brings this technology directly into your workflow.

Best Use Cases

Ideal for documentation and document translation. Less impactful for UI localization, where context is typically shorter and more standardized.

The Vector Cloud app is available now in the Crowdin Store.

Crowdin Plugin for Figma: New Version

In September, we rolled out a major update to the Crowdin Plugin for Figma. Version 83 introduces a redesigned interface for a smoother experience, faster and more reliable screenshot uploads, as well as autosave and clearer reports to make managing translation strings easier. You can now also see which texts are linked to each translation string directly in the edit dialog, and more.

One important change: only one file can be selected at a time when sending translation strings. Along with that, the update delivers overall improvements in stability, speed, and consistency, and, by popular demand, full support for dark mode.

And one more important update – with the release of Figma Buzz, we’ve added support for it in the Crowdin Plugin, so your brand templates can be localized right away.

Crowdin Enterprise: Configurable Session Timeout

Unattended devices, shared computers, and malware that steal browser sessions all pose threats to corporate data stored in Crowdin. Today, we’re releasing a new security feature: configurable session duration.

This setting defines how long a Crowdin session remains active after the last user activity. If linguists or managers use Crowdin actively throughout the day, nothing changes. However, once Crowdin sits idle, the session will automatically expire after the configured time period.

Enhanced API Token Security Controls

Personal API tokens are powerful tools that enable automation and integration - but they also pose significant security risks. A stolen API token can grant unauthorized access to your projects, allowing attackers to modify translations, export sensitive data, or perform actions on behalf of legitimate users.

To help you better manage these risks, we’re introducing API token controls for Crowdin Enterprise:

New admin capabilities:

• Disable personal token creation: Prevent users from creating API tokens entirely.
• View all tokens: See complete information about every API token in your Crowdin Enterprise (creation date, last used date, token name, and the user who created it).
• Revoke any token: Immediately invalidate tokens when needed.
• Enforce expiration policies: Require all API tokens to have expiration dates.

For non-admins:

• Users can now set expiration dates when creating API tokens, ensuring tokens don’t remain valid indefinitely

These controls provide visibility and governance over API token usage across your organization, thereby reducing the attack surface and limiting the potential damage from compromised credentials.

Many Crowdin customers maintain ISO 27001, SOC 2, and other security standards that mandate API key rotation and expiration policies. These new features provide the tools you need to meet compliance requirements — enforce token expiration, audit usage, and revoke access during incidents – all while maintaining workflow flexibility.

Time Logging and Time Spent Report

More and more teams are moving to hourly-based payments, especially now with AI making it harder to evaluate translation work by the traditional per-word model. To support this shift, we’ve added time logging in tasks (Crowdin and Crowdin Enterprise). Any role can now record time directly within a task, with optional comments stored in the task’s comment section.

We’re also introducing a new Time Spent report, which calculates costs based on logged time using a base hourly rate. This provides managers with a clearer view of project budgets and ensures linguists are compensated more fairly when work exceeds simple word counts.

Currently, linguists are required to manually enter the time they spend. We expect a whole new set of apps and integrations that will allow you to automatically track and record time spent using multiple strategies. 

Easier AI Debugging with Crowdin App

Last year, we rolled out the AI Debug app to give your teams more clarity when working with LLMs. Unlike traditional machine translation, where outputs follow a predictable pattern, LLMs can produce results that are inconsistent and often hard to explain. 

That’s why you might need a tool like AI Debug, which saves both the request Crowdin sends to AI and the response it gets back – so you can quickly see where things went wrong and debug.

This month, the app gets a major upgrade. Before, you had to set up a separate provider in the app and lock it to one model. Now, all that is gone.

Once installed, the AI Debug app works instantly with no extra configuration, making troubleshooting faster. So, go and use it now to debug prompts (e.g., pre-translation, AI suggestion, QA check, AI Chat, Alignment) and AI Proxy.

Improvements to the Users page in Crowdin Enterprise

We’ve updated the Users page in Crowdin Enterprise to provide administrators with a better security overview and greater control over their team members. 

The updated interface includes an “Active” status indicator in the “Status” column, which provides a clear view of who can access Crowdin. We recommend that administrators block users who are not actively using Crowdin Enterprise as a security best practice. 

We’ve also added a new Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Status column that clearly indicates which team members have enrolled in 2FA, using color-coded indicators. 

Also, user profile pages now include more security information, such as SSO/SAML provider details, 2FA methods configured by the user, and the number of API tokens created. 

User provenance tracking has also been improved. You can now see exactly how each user joined your organization (invited by a specific person, joined independently, or added via API/SCIM). This data is also accessible through the API. 

Additionally, we’ve refined the table interface by adding context menus for quick actions and improving responsiveness across different screen sizes. This makes user management more efficient for large teams.

AI: Clearer AI Activity Tracking, Prompt Management, Azure OpenAI

• Activity items now clearly show when AI was used for translation. You’ll see an AI icon, along with the exact prompt and model applied.

• Prompts created in a project (via Project Settings> AI) are now tied to that project only, rather than all projects. We’ve also added Prompt Metadata – showing when a prompt was created, last modified, and last used — available on the prompt edit page under Advanced Settings.

• You can now use Azure OpenAI as a provider for Agentic AI, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini.

Context Harvester 0.8.0: Key Updates

This release of Context Harvester adds a new ‘describe’ command that leverages an AI agent to analyze your local repository and automatically generate comprehensive, translator-focused project descriptions. Furthermore, you can now filter strings for processing by their creation date using the new —since option, which accepts both natural language phrases (like “7 days ago”) and specific date formats. The update also includes significant usability enhancements, such as displaying real-time API token usage in the progress bar and more.

New Agile Localization Podcast Episodes

This month, we’ve released 2 new episodes of Crowdin Podcast:

• In the first episode, “Why Open-Source Wins at Enterprise Localization”, we speak with Mathias Bolt Lesniak, Project Ambassador for the TYPO3 Association, to unpack how one of Europe’s leading open-source, community-driven CMS platforms delivers enterprise-grade multilingual content at massive scale.
• For our second episode, “Localization at Semrush”, we sit down with Elena Sadchikova, Team Lead for Localization and UX Writing at Semrush, and Robbin van Schagen, Owner at TYPE Translations, to discuss how Semrush successfully scales localization operations across 55+ products, implementing continuous workflows and effectively balancing human expertise with AI.

Other Updates

• Added a retry option in Pre-translate reports after errors.
• Improved error messages in QA checks.
• On the All Tasks page, you can now filter tasks (by assignee, creator, language, file, due date, status, etc.) and then jump straight to generating a Cost Estimate or Translation Cost report for the filtered tasks via the three-dot menu.
• New activity type: User management. Track when users were added to projects, which permissions they received, and when accounts were blocked or unblocked. This is another step toward strengthening security in Crowdin.
• New option in the Editor to sort strings by key.
• In Crowdin.com, the profile and project pages now load much faster.
• You can now mention a whole team in the Editor.
• You can organize your navigation in Crowdin Enterprise similarly to Crowdin and customize the tab order and visibility (Project Settings > Customize Tabs).

Crowdin Store: Updates and New Apps

New Applications

• JSON5: Provides dedicated support for processing files written in the JSON5 format.
• Export Comments: Easily export all project comments, including those attached to strings, into a structured format for external review or processing.
• Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Integrate powerful machine translation models from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio directly into your Crowdin projects.

Connector and Application Updates

• Dato CMS: Now includes the ability to skip specific fields during synchronization based on their identifier, giving you finer control over what content is sent for localization.
• Cascade Importer: Added support for custom file formats.
• Ditto: Application received an update to its API, adding support for updating variants.
• Sender: Now allows the translation of transactional messages.
• Settings Sync: Has been updated to include support for new configuration settings introduced after its initial release.

New episode of Crowdin Power Up

In the latest episode of Power Up, Dorota Pawlak and Stefan Huyghe showed updated AI tools. Highlights include new Agentic AI capabilities for handling bulk actions and editing source texts, the Context Harvester for automatically extracting and providing context from your code, and the Dubbing Studio app for creating AI-powered localized audio and video content.

External Tools

• CLI 4.11.0: This version introduces the —xliff parameter to the crowdin file upload command, enabling the upload of offline translations, and adds the option to specify an optional destination for the translation upload command.
• GitHub Action v2.11.0
• Android SDK 1.15.0
• JS API Client 1.46.1, 1.47.0, 1.48.0, 1.48.1, 1.48.2, 1.48.3
• Java API Client 1.28.2