Doccano vs VGG Image Annotator

Doccano is a free, open-source data-labeling tool for machine-learning practitioners. Its supported annotation tasks include text classification, sequence labeling, and sequence-to-sequence annotation, with uses such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and text summarization. Users can set up projects, import datasets, add collaborators, annotate examples, and export labeled data. REST APIs let scripts connect to Doccano for model-assisted labeling, and multiple people can work collaboratively. Installation options include pip, Docker, Docker Compose, source, or cloud deployment. The installation guide lists Linux, Windows, and macOS machines running Python 3.8 or later. SQLite 3 is the default database; PostgreSQL configuration is described, and MySQL is mentioned as an option. Imported datasets can be stored using Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. The project also lists mobile and multi-language support, emoji support, and a dark theme. Integration guidance demonstrates Amazon Comprehend Sentiment Analysis and custom REST APIs for auto-labeling. One upgrade caveat is important: the installation guide warns that an upgrade using SQLite 3 can cause database loss.

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.