I'll be honest: when I first saw Phrase's interface, I thought 'great, another enterprise software that needs a PhD to operate.' But after managing localization for a SaaS product across 12 languages for six months, I've become a believer—not because it's perfect, but because the alternatives are so much worse. Phrase sits in that interesting category of tools that seem overcomplicated until you actually need what they do, at which point you wonder how you ever lived without them.
Buy Phrase if you're translating continuously into multiple languages and drowning in coordination overhead—it'll pay for itself in project management time alone. Skip it if you're just dipping your toes into localization or only translate occasionally; you'll be paying for infrastructure you don't need. The sweet spot is established companies ready to treat localization as a systematic process rather than a periodic project.