NVIDIA cuDNN vs ONNX Runtime
NVIDIA cuDNN
developer.nvidia.comONNX Runtime
onnxruntime.aiSide by side
| Figure | NVIDIA cuDNN | ONNX Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Deep Learning Software | 7.5 (#20) | 8.4 (#6) |
| Purpose | cuDNN is a GPU-accelerated library of primitives for deep neural networks. | ONNX Runtime is a cross-platform machine-learning model accelerator with interfaces for hardware-specific libraries. |
| Support | NVIDIA provides cuDNN documentation and a developer forum from the product page. | Documentation questions are directed to issue filing, and the project invites users to report bugs, suggest features, and submit pull requests on GitHub. |
Plans
In their own words
NVIDIA cuDNN
NVIDIA cuDNN has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
ONNX Runtime
ONNX Runtime is a free engine for machine-learning inference and training within existing technology stacks. It can run models from frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow/Keras, TFLite, and scikit-learn. For inference, it optimizes latency, throughput, memory use, and binary size through graph transformations, accelerator-aware partitioning, and optimized computation kernels. Its Execution Providers connect ONNX models to hardware acceleration libraries for CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and specialized NPUs. Listed options include NVIDIA CUDA and TensorRT, Intel OpenVINO, DirectML, Qualcomm QNN, Android NNAPI, Apple CoreML, and WebGPU. Deployment spans cloud servers, edge and mobile devices, and browsers; its web runtime supports browser models and its mobile runtime supports Android and iOS. Supported languages include Python, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Rust. Developers can create smaller web or mobile packages by including only the operators and opsets their models need. The open-source runtime is available on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, self-hosted environments, web, and Windows.