Data labeling software is where images, text, audio and sensor files get tags that a model learns from. The market splits between tools you run with your own annotators and vendors that supply the annotators too.
This guide ranks twelve of them on setup effort, the bill once units are counted, export, and independence.
Vendors can pay for more visibility on this website, for example a higher place in a ranking or more room on a page. Commercial relationships can also affect which products we feature and how prominently. Every vendor link is marked the same, whatever the arrangement behind it. How that works.
In short
What data labeling software does
Data labeling software lets people draw boxes, tag text, transcribe audio or rank model outputs on a dataset, then review the results and export labelled data for training or evaluating machine-learning models.
Every data labeling tool was judged on five points in a fixed order: setup effort, cost in practice, how data is exported, how easily you can leave, and the buyer it was designed for. On top of them sits one rule. The top three places are for challengers, which means vendors outside the big names, where the category has any, and the household brands come in from fourth place. We explain on how we work why the tests are these five and why no product receives a score.
Free hosted plan with small limits; published per-seat Team plan, cheaper yearly; Enterprise self-hosted edition quoted; MIT-licensed Community edition is open source
Yes
Computer vision teams that want to start free and keep a self-hosted exit
Text-only labeling work; listed data types are image, video, 3D, audio
Quoted per engagement; the pricing page is a form to book an intro call with no prices
—
AI labs and enterprises buying expert-labelled data and evaluations at volume
Small teams wanting posted prices and in-house annotators
Country is where the vendor is headquartered or contracts from, which is a different question from where your data is hosted. Where the two tell different stories, the entry says so.
Computer vision annotation with a hosted tier and a self-hosted core
Ranked #1 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Free tierOpen sourceSelf-hostablePublished pricingNorth America
CVAT.ai sells a hosted Solo plan for one person, a Team plan priced per seat with a discount for yearly billing, and an Enterprise edition deployed on-premises or in a private cloud.
Team tiers raise task limits from 750 to 2,500 and storage from 75 GB to 250 GB. The Community edition is MIT-licensed and installs with Docker. SSO, role-based access and audit logs sit in a separate security block of the table.
What stands out
Open source
Self-hosted
Free plan
Where it costs you
The Free plan allows three tasks, 1 GB of storage and annotation-only export, so a real project outgrows it quickly.
The pricing page lists image, video, 3D and audio data types, with nothing on text labeling.
Right for
Computer vision teams that want to start free and keep a self-hosted exit
Wrong for
Text-only labeling work; listed data types are image, video, 3D, audio
United StatesFree hosted plan with small limits; published per-seat Team plan, cheaper yearly; Enterprise self-hosted edition quoted; MIT-licensed Community edition is open source
Scriptable annotation tool bought once and run on your own hardware
Ranked #2 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Self-hostablePublished pricingEurope
The licence covers the installer, web application and plugins, with 23 annotation interfaces for text, images, audio, video and relations. Built-in recipes cover entity recognition, text classification and other model tasks, and active learning models speed up several of them.
Storage options are open, with SQLite among them. The personal licence uses basic HTTP authentication; the company licence adds SSO and priority email support.
What stands out
Lifetime licence
Self-hosted
Python-scripted
Where it costs you
Installation needs Python 3.8 or newer, so annotators cannot simply sign up and start.
Upgrades stop after twelve months unless you buy another year for the licence.
Right for
Developers who want one-time pricing and full control of where data sits
Wrong for
Operations teams wanting a hosted portal for outside annotators
GermanyLifetime licence, published per person or per company seat in packs of five; twelve months of upgrades included; no subscription
Open source labeler for many data types, with a hosted option
Ranked #3 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Open sourcePublished pricingNorth America
Three editions sit on the comparison table: the open source Community edition (Apache-2.0 on GitHub), a cloud Starter plan, and Enterprise on cloud or on-premises. Starter adds a support portal and quality workflows with role-based access.
Enterprise adds LLM-as-a-judge, auto-labeling and bulk labeling, SOC 2 and HIPAA reporting, and an uptime SLA. HumanSignal also sells data services done by domain experts, a separate product.
What stands out
Open source
Hosted Starter
Enterprise SSO
Where it costs you
Hosted Starter stops at 12 users, and any further user raises the monthly bill.
Plugins, SSO, activity logs and project dashboards are listed as Enterprise features, so the free route lacks them.
Right for
Mixed-data labeling projects that start on open source and may grow
Wrong for
Teams wanting posted prices for SSO and compliance reporting
United StatesCommunity edition is open source under Apache-2.0; hosted Starter has a published monthly base fee plus per extra user, free trial; Enterprise quoted
Labeling platform for images, video, medical scans and point clouds
Ranked #4 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Free tierSelf-hostablePublished pricingEurope
Pro prices extra storage in 100 GB blocks, extra files in 100,000 blocks, labeling members per user and labeling hours per hour. The Max add-ons for image, video, medical and point-cloud work are priced separately, and Enterprise runs as private cloud, on-premises or fully offline.
Annotations and projects are unlimited on every plan. Import and export cover PascalVOC and COCO, plus migration from Labelbox and Roboflow.
What stands out
Per-member pricing
Point clouds
Medical imaging
Where it costs you
Free-team projects are archived after 30 days of inactivity, with a download link supplied.
Pro starts at three members, and each extra full member is billed monthly on top.
Right for
Labeling teams with video, medical or point-cloud data and mixed seat types
Wrong for
Buyers wanting one fixed price covering every data type
EstoniaFree Community edition for two members; Pro published per team with member, storage and labeling-hour rates; Enterprise quoted, self-hosted or cloud
Labeling platform for documents, imagery, audio and LLM review
Ranked #5 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Self-hostablePricing on requestEurope
The trial allows 100 assets for text, documents and images, and 5 for video and satellite imagery, with a two-week evaluation offered for harder cases. Grow adds an API and Python SDK for up to 50,000 assets.
Add-ons include cloud storage, extra assets and seats, dedicated labeling services from Kili's own team, and compliance support. Its menu lists image, video, NLP, OCR, geospatial, LLM and audio modalities.
What stands out
Quoted pricing
Audio and video
Services add-on
Where it costs you
The pricing page prints no rates, so cost per asset or seat is only learned from sales.
On-premise deployment and SSO are limited to Enterprise, above the 20-seat Grow plan.
Right for
Document, geospatial and audio labeling teams that want a vendor-run trial first
Wrong for
Buyers needing posted prices or self-hosting at a small scale
FranceQuoted per organisation; trial with seat and asset caps; Grow subscription and Enterprise contract; add-ons for seats, assets and labeling services
Image labeling inside a computer vision training and hosting platform
Ranked #6 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
The Free Tier costs nothing, holds 10 credits a month and keeps projects private, with unlimited admin seats. Core adds monthly credit packs; Enterprise adds SSO, review mode, labeling analytics and history.
AI Labeling features spend credits. Roboflow also lists outsourced labeling at per-box, per-polygon and per-tag rates, and open source Inference for self-hosted deployment of trained models, which is separate from the annotation tool.
What stands out
Credit-based
Free tier
Vision pipeline
Where it costs you
Labeling, training and hosted inference share one credit balance, which makes labeling cost harder to isolate.
New workspaces allow data licensing and model training on private projects by default.
Right for
Teams that label images and then train and deploy vision models there
Wrong for
Text, audio or document labeling projects outside computer vision
United StatesFree tier with monthly credits; paid credit packs with published rates; Enterprise quoted; labeling and hosting draw on one credit balance
Multimodal annotation editor sold in three unpriced tiers
Ranked #7 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
The comparison table gives all three tiers the customisable multimodal editor, data curation, team management and onboarding. Orchestrate compute rises from 1K to 2.5K to 10K hours.
Analytics are standard on Starter and Pro and advanced on Enterprise. Enterprise alone adds a solutions engineer and AI DataOps consulting. The company's own history says it was founded by two brothers in 2018 and raised a Series B.
What stands out
Quoted pricing
Multimodal editor
Orchestrate hours
Where it costs you
No tier shows a price, so budgeting needs a sales conversation.
SSO, the dedicated Slack channel and the customer success manager are absent from Starter.
Right for
Multimodal annotation programmes that need compute hours and a named contact
Wrong for
Small teams wanting to see a price before any call
United StatesQuoted per organisation across Starter, Pro and Enterprise tiers; no prices on the pricing page; Pro starts with a demo request
Data rows, annotation and model tools billed in credits
Ranked #8 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
The limits page splits Free, Starter, Enterprise and Education tiers. Free has 500 LBU a month and 30 users; Starter has a fixed rate per LBU and no user limit; Enterprise has no LBU limit and a 20,000 requests-per-minute API rate.
Ground-truth annotation import rises from 10,000 on Free to 10 million on Enterprise. The company page calls itself profitable and cites $189M raised.
What stands out
Credit-based
Free tier
Data catalog
Where it costs you
Credits are consumed differently by Catalog, Annotate and Model, so forecasting needs the docs' consumption tables.
At the free cap you can export but cannot add data rows, labels or predictions.
Right for
Teams wanting a catalog of data rows next to annotation, billed by use
Wrong for
Buyers who need a flat per-seat annual price
United StatesFree tier of monthly credits; Starter metered per credit at a published fixed rate; Enterprise through sales; credits are consumed per product
Managed annotation and validation service with its own platform
Ranked #9 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
Sama's home page lists image, video, 3D point cloud and text annotation, data validation and model evaluation, with industries from autonomous driving to retail.
It claims a 99% first-batch acceptance rate and mentions a Smart Review quality feature and a Bulk Annotation launch. Offices span San Francisco, Montreal, The Hague and Kampala, among others. A B Corp recertification is announced. No plan or price appears on the pages read.
What stands out
Managed service
Sensor data
Scoped per project
Where it costs you
The pricing address gives a not-found page, so costs come only from a scoping call.
The offer is delivered annotation, so your own staff are not the labelers by default.
Right for
Vision or sensor data projects handed over for expert annotation
Wrong for
Teams wanting self-serve software with their own annotators
United StatesNothing priced on the pages read; each project scoped in a sales conversation
Expert and crowd workforce driven by an agent-built pipeline
Ranked #10 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
The platform page walks through describing a data goal, answering a few questions and reviewing a generated pipeline of task UI, quality criteria, guidelines, pricing and QA method, then calibrating on a small batch before scaling.
Automatic LLM QA runs on every output, with human QA available. Contributors are grouped as domain experts, general annotators and a global crowd. Use cases include RLHF, instruction tuning and content moderation checks.
What stands out
Managed workforce
RLHF data
Agent-built pipelines
Where it costs you
The platform page shows only Toloka's own contributor tiers and no rate card.
A pipeline built by an agent still needs you to review each node before deploying.
Right for
Preference ranking and model-evaluation data needing subject experts
Wrong for
Teams that need to keep annotation inside their own staff
NetherlandsRate card absent from the pages read; the pricing address gives a 404; engagements start with a demo
Listed data services company with a contributor network and a platform
Ranked #11 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestAsia-Pacific
Appen's about page cites 20K+ projects, 170+ countries and 14 offices in six countries, and lists SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification. Services named include custom collection, RLHF, agent trajectories, LiDAR annotation and independent model evaluation.
Appen Limited is ASX-listed, which gives public filings a buyer can read. The platform appears in the menu as ADAP, with no tier detail on the pages read.
What stands out
ASX-listed
Language data
Managed service
Where it costs you
No plan or price appears on the pages read, and the pricing address returns not found.
The company site leads with managed services such as RLHF and red teaming, not a self-serve tool.
Right for
Multilingual speech, language and frontier-model data at large volume
Wrong for
Teams wanting to sign up and label alone
AustraliaNo rates shown on the pages read; a pricing address that gives a 404; sales scopes the work
Expert-labelled training data for AI labs and large enterprises
Ranked #12 of 12 in Best Data Labeling Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
The Data Engine page lists text document processing, transcription, image, full-motion video and 3D sensor fusion with LiDAR as annotation types. The generative branch covers data generation, RLHF, red teaming and model evaluation.
A customer quote praises the worker evaluation pipeline and batch options. Scale AI, Inc. names San Francisco as headquarters. It ranks last here because the pages read show neither a price nor a way to buy without a call.
What stands out
Quoted pricing
RLHF and evals
3D sensor data
Where it costs you
There is no posted price; the pricing page only books a call.
The Data Engine page frames the service as expert-delivered labels, with no self-serve option mentioned.
Right for
AI labs and enterprises buying expert-labelled data and evaluations at volume
Wrong for
Small teams wanting posted prices and in-house annotators
United StatesQuoted per engagement; the pricing page is a form to book an intro call with no prices
Data labeling software lets people draw boxes, tag text, transcribe audio or rank model outputs on a dataset, then review the results and export labelled data for training or evaluating machine-learning models. Compare on the following points, in this order, before you compare features.
01
Check who publishes a price
Only 6 of the 12 print a price; 6 quote per organisation. Comparable without a sales call: CVAT, Prodigy, Label Studio, Supervisely, Roboflow, Labelbox.
02
Ask which country the contract runs through
Look at the contracting entity: these 12 vendors sit in 6 countries, split by region as North America 7, Europe 4, Asia-Pacific 1. The servers can be anywhere; the legal obligations follow the company.
03
Decide if open source matters
2 of these are open source: CVAT, Label Studio. Hosting one yourself trades a subscription for maintenance.
Tool or workforce: choosing between Label Studio and Appen
Data labeling software covers two different purchases. CVAT, Label Studio, Prodigy, Supervisely, Kili Technology, Roboflow, SuperAnnotate and Labelbox are tools your own people or your hired annotators use. Sama, Toloka, Appen and Scale AI describe annotators supplied for you, and none of the four showed a price list on the pages we read.
Decide first who will draw the boxes. If your own domain experts must label, a tool is the right purchase and a service adds a layer you do not need. If you have no annotators, a tool alone leaves the hiring and training to you. Label Studio and Roboflow sell both a tool and a labeling service, so ask which one the quote covers.
Write down who will do the labeling before opening any pricing page
Ask each vendor whether the quote is for software, annotators or both
Check the vendor's pricing page for printed prices, not a booking form
Count the units: LBUs, credits, seats and labeling hours
Data labeling vendors meter different things. Labelbox bills in LBUs consumed by Catalog, Annotate and Model, with different rates for imagery and for multimodal data. Roboflow draws labeling, training and hosting from one credit balance. CVAT charges per seat, Label Studio a base fee plus per extra user, and Supervisely per member, per labeling member and per labeling hour.
Prodigy charges once per licence. The same 20,000 images can cost very different amounts under each, and a seat-based tool is cheap for a small team labeling a large set while a credit-based one favours the opposite. Price one real project in every unit before you compare.
Work out rows, images or hours for your first project in each vendor's unit
Add AI-assisted pre-labeling, which Roboflow charges in credits
Ask which add-ons are separate, such as Supervisely's Max modules
Free plan limits on CVAT, Supervisely, Labelbox and Kili
A free plan is a trial with a ceiling, and the ceilings differ. CVAT's Free plan allows three tasks and 1 GB, with annotation-only export. Supervisely's Community edition holds 2 members, 5 GB and 10,000 files, and archives idle projects after 30 days. Labelbox gives 500 LBU a month, and past that you can export but not add rows or labels.
Kili's trial caps text, document and image assets at 100 and video at 5. Prodigy and Label Studio's Community edition run on your own hardware, so the ceiling is your hosting. Load a realistic slice of your data in week one, and see whether the limit arrives before you have judged the tool.
Upload a representative slice and watch which limit is reached first
Confirm exports include images as well as annotations on the plan you buy
Note how long idle projects are kept before archiving
Exit and hosting: what Prodigy, CVAT and Label Studio let you keep
Labels are the asset, so ask how they leave. Prodigy runs offline on your hardware and describes open data formats. CVAT Community is MIT-licensed and Label Studio Community is Apache-2.0, so both can be hosted yourself. Kili reserves on-premise deployment for Enterprise, and Enterprise editions of CVAT and Label Studio add hosting on your side as paid choices.
Roboflow's new workspaces allow model training on private projects unless an admin disables it, which matters if your images are sensitive. Run one full export in the first month and open it in the format your training code expects.
Export a finished batch and load it into your training pipeline early
Check licence text for the edition you actually run, not the headline
Find any data-use setting that is on by default and turn it off
What goes wrong most often when buying data labeling software
Comparing a per-seat tool with a per-credit one on headline price before pricing the same real project in both.
Treating a service vendor such as Appen or Toloka as software, then discovering no price or self-serve route exists.
Judging a free tier on features and missing the cap, such as CVAT's three tasks or Labelbox's monthly allowance.
Labeling thousands of items before a trial export proves the labels load into the training code.
07
Frequently asked questions
8 answers
What is the best data labeling software in 2026?
CVAT leads our ranking of 12. CVAT began as an Intel internal tool in 2017 and is sold today by CVAT.ai Corporation, which lists a US office in Delaware and an EU office in Cyprus.
Its Community edition carries the MIT licence, so it can run on your own servers. The hosted Free plan stops at three tasks and 1 GB, exports annotations only, and SSO needs a yearly plan.
Which data labeling tools publish their pricing?
The ones that do, with the model each states:
CVAT: Free hosted plan with small limits; published per-seat Team plan, cheaper yearly; Enterprise self-hosted edition quoted; MIT-licensed Community edition is open source.
Prodigy: Lifetime licence, published per person or per company seat in packs of five; twelve months of upgrades included; no subscription.
Label Studio: Community edition is open source under Apache-2.0; hosted Starter has a published monthly base fee plus per extra user, free trial; Enterprise quoted.
Supervisely: Free Community edition for two members; Pro published per team with member, storage and labeling-hour rates; Enterprise quoted, self-hosted or cloud.
Roboflow: Free tier with monthly credits; paid credit packs with published rates; Enterprise quoted; labeling and hosting draw on one credit balance.
Labelbox: Free tier of monthly credits; Starter metered per credit at a published fixed rate; Enterprise through sales; credits are consumed per product.
The remaining 6 sell by quote.
Is there a free data labeling tool?
CVAT, Supervisely, Roboflow, Labelbox come with a no-cost entry point, a free plan or a self-hosted edition.
Where are these data labeling software vendors established?
In 6 countries across 3 regions: North America 7, Europe 4, Asia-Pacific 1.
The next in line are Prodigy, aimed at Developers who want one-time pricing and full control of where data sits, and Label Studio, aimed at Mixed-data labeling projects that start on open source and may grow.
Who should not buy CVAT?
Text-only labeling work; listed data types are image, video, 3D, audio. The Free plan allows three tasks, 1 GB of storage and annotation-only export, so a real project outgrows it quickly..
We rank 12 data labeling software products on this page. If we missed one, its maker can write to us about its purpose and customers. We pick what gets added; the terms of a listing are set out under software advice.
