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CVAT
The open-source annotation workhorse: born at Intel, now run by CVAT.ai as a free self-hosted Community edition plus paid cloud and enterprise tiers with published prices.
| Model | Open-source annotation platform (CVAT.ai) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2018 (open-sourced at Intel); company spun out 2022 |
| Headquarters | United States (spun out of Intel) |
| Pricing | Published — Community free (MIT); Online Team from $23/user/mo billed annually; Enterprise from $12,000/yr |
| Website | www.cvat.ai |
What CVAT does
CVAT (Computer Vision Annotation Tool) began inside Intel in 2017 and was open-sourced in 2018; the team spun out as independent company CVAT.ai in July 2022. It covers bounding boxes, polygons, segmentation, keypoints, video tracking and 3D cuboids, with AI-assisted labeling via models such as SAM.
CVAT is one of the few vendors in this directory that publishes its prices in full: the self-hosted Community edition is free under the MIT licence; CVAT Online lists a free tier, Solo from $33/month ($23 billed annually) and Team from $33 per user/month ($23 billed annually); the self-hosted Enterprise tier is listed from $12,000/year.
Strengths
- Fully published pricing and a genuinely free open-source edition
- Deep video tooling and 20+ export formats
- Huge installed base and community (200,000+ developers reported)
Considerations
- Self-hosting means your team owns deployment, upgrades and support
- Computer-vision only — no text, audio or LLM-feedback workflows
- Cloud free tier is tightly limited (projects, tasks, storage)
Other platforms in the directory
- Labelbox — The platform pick: run annotation in-house on published usage pricing, and bolt on expert services (Alignerr) only where you need them.
- Prolific — The transparency benchmark: a self-serve participant platform with fully published pricing and an enforced participant pay floor.
- Kili Technology — A Paris-built enterprise platform for annotation and LLM evaluation, sold to regulated industries that need data quality controls more than raw labeling volume.
- SuperAnnotate — A multimodal annotation platform that has grown an expert-services arm (SME) hiring domain specialists for AI training and evaluation work.
- Encord — A data infrastructure platform — Annotate, Index, Active — built for physical AI: robotics, autonomous vehicles and sensor-heavy multimodal data.
- Label Studio (HumanSignal) — The most popular open-source labeling tool — multimodal by design — with HumanSignal selling cloud and enterprise editions and optional expert data services.
- Lightly AI — An ETH Zurich spin-off built on one idea: label less, but label the right data — curation and self-supervised pretraining first, annotation second.
- BasicAI — A platform-and-services company built around multi-sensor data — LiDAR fusion annotation for automotive and robotics is its home ground.
- V7 — The London platform company behind Darwin — AI-assisted visual annotation with a low-cost self-serve entry — now also selling document-workflow agents as V7 Go.
- Dataloop — An Israeli data-pipeline and annotation platform with a strong autonomous-vehicle story — acquired by Dell Technologies in December 2025.
Frequently asked questions
What does CVAT do?
The open-source annotation workhorse: born at Intel, now run by CVAT.ai as a free self-hosted Community edition plus paid cloud and enterprise tiers with published prices.
How much does CVAT cost?
CVAT publishes pricing: Published — Community free (MIT); Online Team from $23/user/mo billed annually; Enterprise from $12,000/yr. Confirm current terms on the vendor's site before budgeting, as vendors change plans.
Who is CVAT best for?
Engineering-led teams that want to own their annotation stack, keep data in-house, and pay nothing per seat to start.
Who should not use CVAT?
Buyers who need the annotators supplied — CVAT is software; labeling services are a small newer line, not the core offer.
Sources
- CVAT anniversary history — cvat.ai blog (2025)
- Best Computer Vision Annotation Tools 2026 (CVAT cloud pricing) — Humans in the Loop
Facts on this page were drawn from the public sources above, checked November 2026. If you spot an error, tell us at the corrections address in the footer — we fix sourced errors and note the change.
Profile last updated: November 8, 2026 · How we write profiles · Corrections: [email protected]