Interprefy or Koine for a multilingual event?

When Interprefy is the better choice

Start with the only question that matters if the answer is yes: does this event need a human interpreter? A general meeting where resolutions are voted on, a European works council, a hearing, a medical congress, a negotiation where a sentence has consequences — in those rooms a machine is not an acceptable substitute, and sometimes the law or an agreement says so outright. Interprefy sources and vets interpreters matched to your languages and subject matter, lets you bring your own instead, and covers signed as well as spoken interpretation. Koine has none of that and will tell you to hire someone.

The second reason is reach. Interprefy publishes 80 or more AI languages across 6,000 language pairs, up to 100 languages per event with human interpreters, more than 80 platform integrations and "over 50,000 multilingual yearly conferences and meetings". Koine runs up to eight languages in one session on its largest published plan, and anything beyond that is a quote rather than the shape we are built around.

The third is what happens either side of the event. Their plans bundle Platform, Professional Services and Interpreters, so one supplier carries the AV, the people and the software when something goes wrong at nine in the morning. ISO 27001 with "options for GDPR-compliant data residency in the EU" answers a European procurement questionnaire in a line. Media Hub returns everything "within about 10 minutes", in formats an editor can use. And there is a seven-day free trial, which is more trial than our ten free minutes.

When Koine is

The first reason is that you can price the event yourself. Interprefy publishes no prices at all and states no currency; every route is a conversation with sales, plans run for twelve months, and "unused hours do not roll over". Koine's numbers are on the pricing page: USD 10 per language-hour for a one-off event, or plans at USD 96, 169 and 399 a month, also in kroner and euros. For an organizer who must put a figure in a budget before anyone may request a quote, that is often the whole decision.

The second is that the size of the audience does not move the bill. Interprefy names the "number of attendees needing interpretation" as one of the factors that determine cost. Koine translates each language once and shares that stream with everyone who selects it, so a hundred listeners and four hundred cost the same. Our plans cap the room instead, at 25, 75, 400 and unlimited on Pro.

The third is what the people in the room have to do. Interprefy offers both an app and a web platform, but its equipment-free in-person mode, Interprefy Now, asks attendees to use the Interprefy Now mobile app. Koine is a browser page reached from a QR code: nothing to install, no account, no store listing to get past on a conference Wi-Fi. For a congregation or a town hall meeting, how many people end up listening depends almost entirely on how many steps stand between the QR code and the sound. In the room itself, captions go on the screen through ProPresenter, OBS or vMix, run by one person who can correct a line while it is still showing, and afterwards there is a transcript in each language.

What the table cannot show

Interprefy publishes no latency figure and no prices, so two of the rows a buyer cares about most cannot be compared on paper. That is not a criticism, it is how enterprise sales works. It does mean any comparison between us ends in a quote and a test, and that our ability to write our own numbers down is worth less than it looks if their quote comes in lower. Both AI sides are machine translation, and we will not tell you whose is better; the 1.5-second figure in our column is our own measurement, not an audited one.

The human question runs deeper than a table row. A vetted interpreter is not a faster machine: they carry accountability and confidentiality obligations, and they can ask a speaker to repeat themselves. Koine is for the events that could never have afforded one — a Sunday service, a parents' evening, a municipal information meeting — and for the languages an interpreter budget was never going to stretch to. The comparison with an interpreter sets out where that line falls, and KUDO is the other vendor here with a bench of them.

One thing to ask about, in fairness to both sides: Interprefy's EU data residency is published as an option rather than a default, so it belongs in your quote rather than your assumptions. Ours is a default, Amsterdam and Stockholm, but OpenAI's part still runs outside the EU today, and we would rather write that here than let you find it later.