Argilla vs VGG Image Annotator

Argilla is a free collaboration tool for AI engineers and domain experts building datasets with human feedback. It supports NLP, LLM, and multimodal projects, including classification, named entity recognition, retrieval-augmented generation, and preference tuning. Contributors can provide labels, ratings, rankings, and written responses; annotation tools include filters, AI feedback suggestions, and semantic search. The system handles text and images, while custom fields can represent audio, video, or other content rendered as base64 or HTML. It is compatible with Hugging Face and spaCy, and tutorials cover SetFit and LlamaIndex. Deployment options include Hugging Face Spaces or a local machine or server using Docker Compose. A Python SDK connects to an Argilla server with an API URL and key, and the server exposes REST API documentation. Datasets and records can be moved to or from Python, local disk, and the Hugging Face Hub. Argilla supports OAuth2 through Hugging Face, GitHub, and Google by default. It does not train models; on Hugging Face Spaces, data on ephemeral free storage is lost when the Space restarts.

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.