Annota AI vs VGG Image Annotator

Annota AI combines image annotation, document OCR and review, and AI tools in a web or self-hosted workspace. For images, Magic Select creates an object mask for review and Magic Annotate locates selected labels in an image or dataset. Users can draw and edit bounding boxes and polygons, use segmentation masks, and export images and annotations in COCO format; PNG and JPEG are supported. Document datasets accept PDF, PNG, and JPEG files. OCR extracts content page by page for checking and correction, with exports as a Markdown ZIP or an Obsidian-compatible LLM Wiki workspace. Compatible agents connect through MCP remote servers using Streamable HTTP and OAuth, while organization permissions and shared credits apply. The maker says infrastructure and models run in EU regions without external AI-provider APIs. Plans range from Free at free to Pro at €21.96 a month and Team at €29.28 per member per month; Enterprise pricing is by quote. YOLO training remains private beta and requires separate approval.

VGG Image Annotator (VIA) is a suite of lightweight browser tools for manually annotating images, audio, and video. The applications are distributed as single HTML files, allowing offline use without installation or setup. VIA3 handles images, video, audio, and shared or collaborative projects. VIA2 works with image files, does not support shared projects, and remains maintained. Annotation shapes include rectangles, circles, ellipses, points, polygons, and polylines. Projects can import or export annotations as CSV or JSON, while scripts support COCO and Web Annotation formats; a Python package converts VIA projects to COCO. Shared work can use a free public Version File Store maintained by the Visual Geometry Group, or a user-run VFS. VIA is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without external libraries and released under the two-clause BSD license for academic and commercial use. Downloads include ZIP archives and standalone HTML files for versions 2 and 3. The makers provide a guide, FAQ, and email contacts.