Annotide vs CVAT
CVAT (Computer Vision Annotation Tool) is one of the longest-running open-source annotation tools, originally built at Intel and now maintained by CVAT.ai. People searching for a “CVAT alternative” or “self-hosted CVAT” are usually looking for one of: a simpler licence story, built-in support for media beyond images/video, or a different pricing shape for larger teams. This page compares the two directly.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| Annotide | CVAT | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Source-available, Elastic License 2.0; a key adds users and Business features | MIT (Community edition) |
| Self-hosted | Yes, only option | Yes (Community), free |
| Hosted option | None | CVAT Online (cloud), Free/Solo/Team tiers |
| Enterprise self-hosted | Yes — €18/user/month billed yearly, from €3,000/year | Yes — CVAT Enterprise, from ~$12,000/year |
| SSO | OIDC and SAML 2.0 (Business, €20/user/month) | OIDC and SAML (Enterprise only) |
| Model-assisted labelling | Bring-your-own model gateway (batch pre-labelling, interactive segmentation, active learning, retraining webhook); optional bundled SAM 2.1 image for click-to-polygon segmentation, on CPU | Bundled SAM2/SAM3 auto-annotation on hosted tiers; Hugging Face/Roboflow integrations |
| Media types | Image, video, audio, text, PDF, time series, LLM evaluation, multimodal | Image, video, 3D point clouds, audio |
| Quality control | Consensus annotation, agreement metrics (kappa, Krippendorff alpha, IoU, span-F1), disagreement fusion, gold tasks | Job validation, ground-truth jobs, honeypot tasks (Team/Enterprise) |
Where media lives
Section titled “Where media lives”Self-hosted CVAT Community keeps everything on your own infrastructure, same as Annotide. The difference shows up if you use CVAT Online (the hosted cloud edition): free and Solo plans store your uploads on CVAT’s infrastructure unless you attach your own cloud storage bucket, and internal storage is capped by plan (1 GB on Free up to 250 GB on larger Team plans). Annotide has no hosted mode at all — there’s nothing to opt into, because the backend only ever issues signed URLs against storage you already own.
Pricing shape
Section titled “Pricing shape”CVAT’s free option is its self-hosted Community edition (MIT licence, no feature cap). Its paid tiers are priced in two different ways: CVAT Online is seat- and usage-capped ($23–33/user/month depending on commitment, scaling 2–50 members), and CVAT Enterprise — self-hosted in your VPC or on-premises, including air-gapped environments — starts at roughly $12,000/year for a “Basic” support tier, with a custom “Premium” tier adding a dedicated support engineer and included development hours.
Annotide publishes every price. Community is free for up to three users, with every annotation feature and the model gateway. Team is €12/user/month (or €29/month for a team of 5 plus €12 per extra user). Business, €20/user/month, adds SSO, SCIM, folder permissions, full audit history and quality control (consensus, agreement, gold tasks). Both are self-serve at any team size. Enterprise is €18/user/month billed yearly (from €3,000/year), with annual invoicing, offline keys and custom contract terms. There’s no separate usage metering and no cloud-hosted tier to budget around.
Licensing
Section titled “Licensing”CVAT Community is MIT-licensed: fully permissive, no key required. CVAT Enterprise adds features under a separate commercial licence. Annotide is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0: free to read, modify and run, commercially too, up to three users without a key; it may not be offered to others as a hosted service, and the licence key may not be circumvented. If your priority is an open-source licence with no conditions at all, CVAT’s MIT licence is the more permissive choice.
When to choose CVAT instead
Section titled “When to choose CVAT instead”- You want a large, mature open-source community with a long track record in computer vision specifically, plus SAM2/SAM3 auto-annotation and tracking on the hosted tiers — Annotide’s bundled SAM2 covers click-to-polygon segmentation only.
- You need 3D point cloud annotation, which CVAT supports and Annotide does not.
- You’d rather not run any infrastructure at all and are fine with CVAT’s hosted cloud (Free/Solo/Team) for a project of modest size.
- Your licence preference is an OSI-approved open-source licence (MIT), or you need more than three users for free.
When Annotide fits better
Section titled “When Annotide fits better”- SSO, audit history and consensus QA at a published €20/user/month, self-serve, with a 30-day trial — CVAT reserves them for its Team and Enterprise plans.
- You want text (NER/relations), PDF, time series and LLM evaluation (ranking, scoring, conversations) in the same tool as image/video, not just computer-vision media.
- You want a flat per-seat price with no usage units or storage tiers to track, from an EU vendor, with the licence key enforced entirely inside your own installation — no dependency on reaching Annotide’s vendor service for the software to keep working.