Annotide vs V7 Darwin

V7 Darwin is a hosted annotation platform known for strong auto-annotation (SAM2-based) and support for specialized document and medical formats. This page compares it to Annotide directly.

At a glance

	Annotide	V7 Darwin
Licence	Source-available, Elastic License 2.0; a key adds users and Business features	Proprietary, closed source
Deployment	Self-hosted only, on your own cloud or servers	Hosted SaaS
Where media lives	Your own storage, always	V7’s own AWS infrastructure — V7 publishes that Darwin data is stored on AWS S3 in Ireland (EU) and is not moved outside the EU
Pricing	Per seat, published: free up to 3 users; Team €12/user/month (or €29/month for 5 plus €12 per extra user); Business €20/user/month	Custom: platform fee + user licenses + data-volume charges; no published list price
SSO	OIDC and SAML 2.0, in Business (€20/user/month, self-serve, 30-day trial)	SAML / Google OAuth, Enterprise tier
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 (no auto-track)	Auto-Annotate and auto-track built on SAM2, “label similar objects,” model-in-the-loop pre-labelling
Media types	Image, video, audio, text (NER/relations), PDF, time series, LLM evaluation, multimodal	Image, video, PDF/documents, specialized medical formats (DICOM, SVS)

Where media lives

V7 Darwin is hosted SaaS: V7 publishes that any Darwin data reaching them is stored on AWS S3 servers in Ireland (EU) and is not moved outside the EU — a concrete, sourced data-residency commitment, but it still means your media is copied into V7’s own cloud account, not kept in yours. Annotide’s backend never proxies or copies media in the first place: browsers read and write directly against your own storage account via short-lived signed URLs, so there’s no vendor copy to reason about at all.

Pricing shape

V7 Darwin’s pricing is entirely custom — a platform fee plus user licenses plus data-processing volume, quoted after a sales call, with no published starting number. Annotide publishes its full list: Community free for up to three users, Team €12/user/month (or €29/month for a team of 5 plus €12 per extra user), Business €20/user/month with SSO, SCIM and quality control, Enterprise at €18/user/month billed yearly, from €3,000/year, for annual invoicing, volume pricing, offline keys and custom contract terms. If budgeting before a sales conversation matters to you, that’s a meaningful difference regardless of which tool ultimately costs more at your scale.

Licensing

V7 Darwin is closed-source, proprietary SaaS. Annotide’s source is available to read and modify under the Elastic License 2.0: free to run, commercially too, with a key for more than three users or the Business features.

When to choose V7 Darwin instead

You want SAM2-based auto-annotation, auto-tracking and “label similar objects” — Annotide’s bundled SAM2 covers click-to-polygon segmentation only.
You work with specialized medical imaging formats (DICOM, SVS/whole-slide) that V7 has purpose-built tooling for — Annotide’s image pipeline does not currently handle whole-slide formats.
You’re comfortable with a hosted platform and a custom, volume-based pricing conversation rather than a published per-seat rate.

When Annotide fits better

Your media needs to stay in your own cloud account rather than V7’s, even an EU one — there is no vendor-hosted copy at any tier.
You want published per-seat prices instead of a platform-fee + volume quote.
You want OIDC or SAML SSO at a published price with a free trial rather than reserved for Enterprise.
You want LLM evaluation, text and time-series annotation alongside image/video, in a single self-hosted deployment.