Smartcat Reviews 

I've enjoyed working with the platform and the clients find it very user-friendly as well. I wish customer service would improve as the response time when I submit at ticket can take awhile unless I escalate the issue with our SC Account Manager.

SmartCAT helped me grow in my career as a linguist. The interface is simple and efficient, easy to navigate and understand. Payments are always on time, and when there are some delays, they work fast to pay on time.

SmartCat staff is helpful! The platform has a lot of different sections, which can be confusing at first, but once you know where to go it's not too bad.

Great customer support which provide quick solutions or explanation to our issues, smooth processes.

Sometimes it could take a little bit too long for the file to upload in Smartcat, but usually these issues are solved

As a CAT tool it works. Nothing really special, it is simply another tool in the market.
However, they also claim to handle payment. And this is something which should be avoided. The payment process is very long, they do not respond to emails. They seize the money on no grounds and refuse to pay it.
So if you are a freelancer and your client pays you via Smartcat, it is a bad choice. This should be avoided as Smartcat team are not able to handle this. Apparently, financial aspects are not their thing. Highly unprofessional.

A lot of mistakes, not filtering !diotic words which definitely cannot have place in any dictionary, eg. regular object type name translated as "I am drunk", such a g@rbage.
Support is a joke. No real contact except "ticket". It is treating clients like a dirt, unprofessional. A lot of bugs which in high workload are nightmare (cannot mark segment or correct or complete the project)! No real help for couple of days. The worst tool I had used.

Smartcat let me work normally, then blocked my payment without warning.

For six months, my money has been withheld for no clear reason, and I have received no response from support, despite sending several messages.

Because of this block and the lack of money, I lost my home.

This is unacceptable for a platform that depends on the work of freelance translators. Suspending payments without communication is dangerous and disrespectful.

Worst crooks ever!
Tried to cancel the service, they did not respond at all. After finally getting an response they said you have the cancel the service at least a month before renewal and by then it was 29-days before.

Smartcat conned us. When we signed up there was no indication that the subscription would auto renew with a 30 cancellation notice requirement. The customer agreement is buried deep in their website and not included in any invoice/receipt correspondence when you sign up. They just renew and take the money.

I have been contacted by Market Delivery Team nearly mid-May this year for an urgent project which is quite big. I accepted it and finished by deadline. The project has several repetitions. It has been assigned to three persons. After the task has been done, project manager emailed us that repetitions had to be uncounted though it's their fault. Moreover, it's now three months already, but the project has not been paid. Worst than that, they deleted the project without notification. I cannot track status of the project. I wrote them to ask why the finished project has been cancelled. They said do not worry, they already created a new project at their backend. Last week I wrote to them to ask about payment since it's already three months. They said they would follow up with the client. This week I wrote to them again. They did not reply anymore. It's several ten thousands words. Really disappointing.

Terrible interface, hard to use. Got billed for credits multiple times but nothing was translated.

I am a translator. Supprt Team is a polite animal (-s), who do not care that you are not paid. Translators are just stupid beeings, who do job and no matter that they are not paid.

I do not NEVER EVER work on this platform because you will not be paid! They accept obligations, but do not fulfil them at all!

I tried smartcat for a few small projects - and found them riddled with errors requiring extensive review work and re-work. In a nutshell - using smartcat cost me more than not using it. Decided to not use it any further - and be done with the bad experience.
Was notified by email that my account would auto-renew this week - and went in to cancel the account - and could not find ANYWHERE to do that.
No response to emails - messages - when I called - was told that I needed to give 30 days advance notice to not autorenew. Users should be aware of this - its an exploitive practice - and speaks volumes about the company.

Hi
Smartcat do no have any customer support. You cannot change email, cannot delete account, customer service do not answer at all. So be warned!

The translation was very inaccurate. We've hired an external translator and now we can't download the translation he made. I booked a call with them and no one showed up.

As a seasoned translator I have used many CAT tools over the years, and while I quite like the layout and look of Smartcat it leaves a lot to be desired.

My main issue is with the so-called spellcheck function. If you are lucky SC might flag a typo - but not always, and if you move onto a new segment (even without confirming it), the typo will never be flagged again. Therefore, the only way to perform a proper spellcheck is by generating the target file or the bilingual file to identify the typos, and then manually make the corrections in SC!! It makes so much work.
Also the formatting tools are rubbish e.g. there is no option to italicise words. As linguists we often need to apply italics to foreign words. You can tell this application has not been developed with linguists. Also no option for superscript!!
Another extremely annoying thing is the constant 'refresh' notifications that are impossible to turn off, and why can't we as translators turn on/off the auto-propagation, which frequently messes up my translations due to different word order between French and English.

Smartcat does not protect the translators form scammers. I have applied to translations when offers were available, but no answer directly through Smartcat. When I contacted the individual (who apparently represented an entity called Free writers) via chatwork.com then he answered and made an offer. I made the translation on time but, surprise, they told me they can't pay me, allthough I gave them my bank details, because they needed first a selfie (really? was it a beauty contest?), my ID and 100 usd for "linking" my account to their I don't know what. When I complained to Smartcat they shrugged it off, telling me they won't do anything because the discussion took place on chatwork.com. Smartcat help these fraudsters and they are untrusty. Be smart and beware of Smartcat.

I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, but a number of freelancers are struggling to achieve getting paid for the work they have done on SmartCat, myself included.

It used to be a good and trustworthy platform, but over the past year there seems to be a major increase in scammers and also multiple cases of failure of payment (just sign up and visit the SmartCat Community pages where post after post is addressing this very issue).

According to SmartCat it is supposedly down to 'technical issues', however those 'technical issues' seem to have lasted half a year or more - not exactly impressive for a tech company!

Freelancers are waiting for months on end, and sometimes in vain, to get paid. Some aren't paid at all.

Furthermore, SmartCat has been banned from posting jobs on ProZ which usually isn't a good indicator.

Sehr schlechte Plattform - Sehr schlechte Übersetzungen ohne Übersetzer.

I've been on Smartcat for several years now, and it's so sad to see that there's no improvement at all despite the warnings of many translators. As a fellow translator put it so well, "they are becoming a villain". A customer needs to accept a job on Smartcat before the payment can be released. But currently, a customer can take as much time as it likes to accept a job, which is ridiculous and unacceptable. It also means that customers spend this time to prolong the payment terms. For ex. if they wait 20 days to accept a job (which could probably be done in a few hours), and the payment terms are 45 days, then they would've simply made the payment terms 65 days very easily. If the customer unnecessarily takes a really long time to accept a job, the translator can contact Support, but lately they haven't been responding to those e-mails too. Another issue is that translators are reviewed by the clients, but the translators can't do the same. So when working with a new client, the translator has no idea what they're getting into. There's also no information at all about a client other than simply its name! (Smartcat offers payment guarantees to translators if they contact Support, but if they don't respond to those requests, it's of course no use at all) In addition, when a translator updates their price, they have to tell the customer to do the same, which constitutes for a really bad and ill-thought process. Normally I'd prefer telling my customer in advance that I'm raising my price, and when I raise it on my profile, they should also get a message on their screen informing them that my price has changed and asking them whether they accept it or not, in which case they'd simply click "Accept" and the price would be updated. That would be much easier. But now I have to ask the client to manually update it, which they usually don't know how to, and a client of mine actually told me that she thought "the price would be automatically updated" anyway! It actually gets even more complicated if I raise my price, and then the client assigns me a task under a certain project. In that case the price of the task can't be raised and the client has to create a new project for such task and also properly update my price, which is such a hassle, and an inefficient and really bad process for both the client and the translator. I've been through such an experience and both the client and I suffered tremendously writing back and forth. All in all, I'm so sad and disappointed to see Smartcat go down this path of unethical practices. I'm afraid that it will lead to their downfall and I really wouldn't want that. I do hope they come to their senses very soon!