5 posts tagged with "Migration"

If you ask why a team migrated away from i18next or react-intl, you'll hear specific stories — not abstract critiques. "We shipped a missing-key bug to French users for three weeks." "Our PM keeps asking what homepage.cta.v2.final actually says." "We tried to add Spanish and it became a six-week project."

This article documents the real friction points, drawn from actual migration conversations. If any of these feel familiar, you're not imagining it — they're systemic costs of the key-based workflow.

If you're on Lokalise but you've realized you're not actually using TMS features — no translators, no glossaries, no in-context review — and Lokalise has just become an expensive JSON-file storage with AI auto-translate enabled, this guide walks through migrating to i18n-keyless.

If you do use Lokalise's TMS features (translator team, glossaries, branding workflows), don't migrate. Read the comparison — Lokalise is the right tool for that workflow.

If your app is on react-intl (FormatJS) and you've decided to switch to i18n-keyless, this guide walks through the migration end-to-end: dual-run strategy, message-by-message replacement, handling ICU MessageFormat, and finally removing react-intl.

If you haven't decided yet, read the comparison first — react-intl genuinely wins for ICU-heavy use cases.

If you've decided to move from i18next to i18n-keyless, this is the practical guide. We'll cover the dual-run strategy (so you can ship the migration incrementally), code transformations, gotchas around namespaces / interpolation / pluralization, and how to handle existing translation files.

Read the comparison article first if you haven't decided yet.

If you've already decided i18next isn't the right fit, the question isn't whether to migrate — it's what to migrate to. The answer depends on what's actually painful about your current setup, how much migration budget you have, and what your team's localization workflow looks like.

This guide is a decision framework for picking the destination.