Awnsy VS Diffee

Awnsy's answer

Mac users who work or read in languages that aren't their native one and translate many times a day: documentation, PDFs, emails, chats, screenshots. Especially people who don't want their text to leave the machine, or who need translation offline. Requires macOS 15 or later on an Apple silicon Mac.

Awnsy's answer

The translation model is downloaded inside the app and runs locally on the Mac. There is no account, no API key and no internet needed, and the text never leaves the machine. Three on-device models are included, each covering its own set of languages; the default, Hy-MT2 1.8B, translates a sentence in about a second on an M1 MacBook Air.

It also translates text you can't select: drag a box around an image, a scanned PDF or a video and on-device OCR reads it. Users who want cloud quality can add their own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or use any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Awnsy's answer

I'm Alexey, a software developer for about 15 years, and Awnsy is my first Mac app. I work in languages that aren't my native one and read a lot of documentation in PDFs, and I got tired of the copy, switch to a browser, paste, read, switch back loop, dozens of times a day.

The first version, in May 2025, was a hotkey that sent the clipboard to the OpenAI API and showed the answer in a popup. It worked, but it needed a key and internet, and the text left the machine. In summer 2026 the translation moved onto the Mac itself: the model downloads inside the app and runs locally. Choosing the model took a script that ran several translation models over the same texts and scored them. The one kept as default, Hy-MT2 1.8B, translates a sentence in about a second on an M1 MacBook Air; the 4B models scored about the same but were 2 to 5 times slower. Double ⌘C and screen area translation came later and are now the two most used ways in.

Awnsy's answer

• Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit (native, no Electron, no web view)
• MLX via mlx-swift-lm for on-device models: Hy-MT2 1.8B, TranslateGemma 4B, Qwen3.5 4B
• Apple Vision for on-device OCR
• StoreKit for in-app purchases
• macOS Keychain for API keys; fully sandboxed

Awnsy's answer

• Local by default: unlike DeepL for Mac or Google Translate, the default engine runs on the Mac, so it works offline and nothing is sent to a server.
• Ships its own model: Easydict offers offline translation only through Apple Translate or a separately installed Ollama; Awnsy downloads its model inside the app.
• Wider language list than the built-in macOS translation: it covers languages Apple's list lacks and needs no Apple ID, Siri or region.
• Selected text and screen areas in one app: double ⌘C for selectable text, a drag-to-translate box for images, scanned PDFs and video.
• No account for any tier; text translation is free and unlimited.