Alibaba Cloud PAI iTAG vs CVAT

Alibaba Cloud PAI iTAG is a data-labeling platform for image, text, video, audio and multimodal datasets. Built-in image tasks include classification, object detection, OCR, table recognition and semantic segmentation; official templates also cover image-text explanation, conversation ranking, visual question answering and video OCR. Teams can use official or tenant templates, or create templates for business-specific labeling. A job brings together an OSS-backed dataset and template with labels, subtasks, checks, labelers and reviewers. Manual labeling is free, and selected large-model labeling templates are currently free; OSS storage and data transfer are billed separately. Input data must be in Alibaba Cloud OSS, and the workspace and bucket must be in the same region. Dataset imports require an index file rather than a direct path to a folder of raw files. From August 1, 2026, iTAG 1.0 is allowlist-only and in maintenance mode. Existing customers with prior labeling tasks or datasets can continue using current features. New users seeking AI-powered automatic dataset labeling are directed to Multimodal Data Management. API operations include listing, creating, updating and deleting templates and labeling tasks.

CVAT turns images, video, 3D data and audio into labeled datasets for AI workflows. Its annotation tools include boxes, masks, polygons, keypoints, skeletons and object tracks, with additional listed types such as cuboids, ellipses and tags. Teams can review jobs through validation and acceptance stages and assess quality using ground truth, honeypots and consensus workflows. Storage connections include Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, compatible buckets and self-hosted storage. CVAT names SAM 2, SAM 3, Ultralytics, Hugging Face and custom models as labeling aids. It exports to more than 20 formats, including COCO, YOLO, KITTI, Cityscapes and Pascal VOC, and offers API, SDK and CLI automation. Deployment can be managed in the cloud or self-hosted, including on-premises and air-gapped options. Free plans are available; online paid plans start at $23/user/mo billed annually. CVAT lists security controls but says it does not hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications.