12 Best Data Annotation and Labeling Companies [2024]

With increasing reliance on computer vision (CV) systems in multiple industrial domains, the demand for robust data annotation solutions is rising exponentially. The most recent reports project the data annotation tools market to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.8% from 2024 to 2032.

However, as several companies emerge offering annotation platforms and services, finding a cost-effective provider is challenging. While many platforms offer advanced annotation features, only a few meet the scalability and security requirements essential for enterprise-level CV applications.

This article discusses the ten best video and image annotation companies in 2024 to help you with your search. The following lists the companies we think are driving the data annotation space:

1. Encord
2. iMerit
3. Appen
4. Label Your Data
5. KeyMakr
6. TrainingData
7. SuperbAI
8. Kili Technology
9. Telus International
10. SuperAnnotate
11. CogitoTech
12. LabelBox

Top 12 Data Annotation and Data Labeling Companies

Data annotation companies offering labeling solutions must meet stringent security and scalability requirements to match the high standards of the modern artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Below we've ranked twelve data annotation companies based on the following factors: 

• Data security protocols
• Scalability
• Collaboration
• Ease of use
• Supported data types
• Automation
• Other functionalities for streamlining the annotation workflow

Let’s explore each company's annotation platforms or services and see the key features based on the above factors to help you determine the most suitable option.

Encord

Encord is an end-to-end data platform that enables you to annotate, curate, and manage computer vision datasets through AI-assisted annotation features.

Encord also provides intuitive dashboards to view insights on key metrics, such as label quality and annotator performance, to optimize workforce efficiency and ensure you build production-ready models faster.

SOTA Model-assisted Labeling and Customizable Workflows with Encord Annotate

Key Features

• Data security: Encord complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards. It uses advanced encryption protocols to ensure data security and privacy.
• Scalability: The platform allows you to upload up to 500,000 images (recommended), 100 GB in size, and 5 million labels per project. You can also upload up to 200,000 frames per video (2 hours at 30 frames per second) for each project. See more guidelines for scalability in the documentation.
• Collaboration: You can create workflows and assign roles to relevant team members to manage tasks at different stages. User roles include admin, team member, reviewer, and annotator.
• Ease-of-use: Encord Annotate offers an intuitive user interface (UI) and an SDK to label and manage annotation projects.
• Supported data types: The platform lets you annotate images, videos (and image sequences), DICOM, and Mammography data.
• Supported annotation methods: Encord supports multiple annotation methods, including classification, bounding box, keypoint, polylines, and polygons.
• Automated labeling: The platform speeds up the annotation with automation features, including:
  - Segment Anything Model (SAM) to automatically create labels around distinct features in all supported file formats.
  - Interpolation to auto-create instance labels by estimating where labels should be created in videos and image sequences.
  - Object tracking to follow entities within images based on pixel information enclosed within the label boundary.
• Integration: Integrate popular cloud storage platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Open Telekom Cloud OSS, to import datasets.

Best for

• Teams looking for an enterprise-grade image and video annotation solution to produce high-quality data for computer vision models.

Pricing

• Encord has a pay-per-user pricing model with Starter, Team, and Enterprise options.

iMerit

iMerit offers Ango Hub, a data annotation solution built on a generative AI framework that lets you build use-case-specific applications for autonomous vehicles, agriculture, and healthcare industries.

iMerit

Key Features

• Collaboration: The Ango Hub solution lets you add labelers and reviewers to customized workflows for managing annotation projects.
• Ease-of-use: The platform offers an intuitive UI to label items, requiring no coding expertise.
• Supported data types: Ango Hub supports audio, image, video, DICOM, text, and markdown data types.
• Supported labeling methods: The solution supports bounding boxes, polygons, polylines, segmentation, and tools for natural language processing (NLP).
• Integration: The platform features integrated plugins for automated labeling and machine learning models for AI-assisted annotations.

Best for

• Teams searching for an integrated labeling platform for annotating text, video, and image data.

Pricing

• Pricing information is not publicly available. Contact the team to get a quote.

Appen

Appen offers data annotation solutions for building large language models (LLMs) by providing a standalone labeling platform and data labeling services through expert linguists.

Appen

Key Features

• Workforce capacity: Appen’s managed services include more than a million specialists speaking over 200 languages across 170 countries. With the option to combine its platform with its services, the solution becomes highly scalable.
• Supported data types: Appen’s platform lets you label documents, images, videos, audio, text, and point-cloud data.
• Supported annotation methods: Labeling methods include bounding boxes, cuboids, lines, points, polygons, ellipses, segmentation, and classification.
• Instruction datasets: The company also offers domain-specific instruction datasets for training LLMs.

Best for

• Teams looking for a hybrid solution for building multi-modal models for text and vision applications.

Pricing

• Pricing is not publicly available.

Label Your Data

Label Your Data is a data annotation service provider offering video and image annotation services for CV and NLP applications.

Label Your Data

Key Features

• Data security: The company complies with ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA standards.
• Workforce capacity: Label Your Data builds a remote team of over 500 data annotators to speed up the annotation process.
• Supported data types: The solution supports image, video, point-cloud, text, and audio data.
• Supported labeling methods: CV methods include semantic segmentation, bounding boxes, polygons, cuboids, and key points. NLP methods include named entity recognition (NER), sentiment analysis, audio transcription, and text annotation.

Best for

• Teams looking for a secure annotation service provider for completely outsourcing their labeling efforts.

Pricing

• Label Your Data provides on-demand, short- and long-term plans.

Keymakr

Keymakr is an image and video annotation service provider that manages labeling processes through its in-house professional experts.

Keymakr

Key Features

• Labeling capacity: You can label up to 100,000 data items.
• Supported data types: The platform supports image, video, and point-cloud data.
• Supported labeling methods: Keymakr offers annotations that include bounding boxes, cuboids, polygons, semantic segmentation, key points, bitmasks, and instance segmentation.
• Smart assignment: The solution features a smart distribution to match relevant annotators with suitable tasks based on skillset.
• Performance tracking: Keymakr provides performance analytics to track progress and alert managers in case of issues.
• Data collection and creation: The company also offers services to create relevant data for your projects or collect it from reliable sources.

Best for

• Beginner-level teams working CV projects, requiring data creation and annotation services.

Pricing

• Pricing is not publicly available.

TrainingData

TrainingData is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data labeling application for CV projects, featuring pixel-level annotation tools for accurate labeling.

TrainingData

Key Features

• Data security: The company provides a Docker image to run on your local network through a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection.
• Scalability: You can label up to 100,000 images.
• Collaboration: TrainingData’s platform lets you create projects and add relevant collaborators with suitable roles, including reviewer, annotator, and admin.
• Supported labeling methods: The platform offers multiple labeling tools, including a brush and eraser for pixel-accurate segmentation, bounding boxes, polygons, key points, and a freehand drawer for freeform contours.
• Integration: TrainingData integrates with any cloud storage service that complies with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) policy.

Best for

• Teams looking for an on-premises image annotation platform for segmentation tasks.

Pricing

• TrainingData offers free, pro, and enterprise packages.

Try Encord free

SuperbAI

SuperbAI offers multiple products for building AI models, including a data management platform, a labeling solution, and a tool for training, evaluating, and deploying models.

SuperbAI

Key Features

• Data security: SuperbAI complies with SOC standards and encrypts all data using Advanced Encryption Standard - 256 (AES-256).
• Collaboration: The platform offers access management tools and lets you invite team members as admins, labelers, and managers.
• Supported data types: SuperbAI supports images and videos in PNG, BMP, JPG, and MP4 formats. It also supports point-cloud data.
• Supported labeling methods: The solution supports all standard labeling methods, including bounding boxes, polylines, polygons, and cuboids.
• Integration: The platform integrates with Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, and Slack.

Best for

• Teams looking for an integrated data management solution for training machine learning algorithms.

Pricing

• SuperbAI offers starter and enterprise packages.

Kili Technology

Kili Technology offers an intuitive labeling platform to annotate data for LLMs, generative AI, and CV models with quality assurance features to produce error-free datasets.

Kili Technology

Key features

• Collaboration: The platform lets you assign multiple roles to team members, including reviewer, admin, manager, and labeler, to collaborate on projects through instructions and feedback.
• Ease-of-use: Kili offers a user-friendly UI for managing workflows, requiring minimal code.
• Supported labeling methods: The tool supports bounding boxes, optical character recognition (OCR), NERs, pose estimation, and semantic segmentation.
• Automation: Kili supports automated labeling through active learning and pre-annotations using ChatGPT and SAM.

Best for

• Data scientists looking for a lightweight annotation solution for building generative AI applications.

Pricing

• Pricing depends on the number of items you need to label.

Telus International

Telus International’s Ground Truth (GT) studio offers three platforms as part of a managed service to build training datasets for ML models.

GT Manage helps with people and project management; GT Annotate lets you annotate image and video data. GT Data is a data creation and collection tool supporting multiple data types.

Telus International

Key Features

• Data security: GT Annotate complies with SOC 2 standards and implements two-factor authentication with firewall applications and intrusion detection for data security.
• Collaboration: GT Manage features workforce management tools for optimal task distribution and quality control.
• Supported data types: You can collect image, video, audio, text, and geo-location data using GT data.
• Supported labeling methods: GT Annotate supports bounding boxes, cuboids, polylines, and landmarks.

Best for

• Teams looking for a complete AI solution for collecting, labeling, and managing raw data.

Pricing

• Pricing information is not publicly available.

SuperAnnotate

SuperAnnotate offers a data labeling tool that lets you manage AI data through collaboration tools and annotation workflows while providing quality assurance features to produce labeling accuracy.

SuperAnnotate

Key Features

• Collaboration: SuperAnnotate lets you create teams and assign relevant roles such as admin, annotator, and reviewer.
• Ease-of-use: The platform has an easy-to-use UI.
• Supported data types: SuperAnnotate supports image, video, text, and audio data.
• Supported labeling methods: The platform has tools for categorization, segmentation, pose estimation, object tracking, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition.

Best for

• Teams looking for an annotation solution to build generative AI applications.

Pricing

• The platform offers free, pro, and enterprise versions.

Cogito

Cogito is a data labeling service provider that employs a large pool of human annotators to deliver annotations for generative AI, CV, content moderation, NLP, and data processing.

Cognito

Key Features

• Data security: Cogito complies with GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, CCPA, and ISO 27001 standards.
• Supported data types: The platform supports image, video, audio, text, and point-cloud data.
• Automation: Cogito uses AI-based algorithms to label large data volumes.

Best for

• Startups looking for a company to outsource their AI operations.

Pricing

• Pricing is not publicly available.

Labelbox

Labelbox offers multiple products for managing AI projects. Its data labeling platform allows you to annotate various data types for building vision and LLM applications.

LabelBox

Key Features

• Data security: Labelbox complies with several regulatory standards, including GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.
• Collaboration: Users can create projects and invite in-house labeling team members with relevant roles to manage the annotation workflow.
• Ease-of-use: Labelbox has a user-friendly interface with a customizable labeling editor.
• Automation: The platform supports model-assisted labeling (MAL) to import AI-based classifications for your data.
• Integrability: Labelbox integrates with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to access data repositories quickly.

Best for

• Teams looking for labeling solutions to build applications for e-commerce, healthcare, and financial services industries.

Pricing

• Labelbox offers free, starter, and enterprise versions.

Data Annotation Companies: Ranking methodology

Below, you can find a little bit more information about the criteria we used to rank the products on this page. 

• Data security protocols: Compliance with data security regulations and use of encryption algorithms.
• Scalability: The solution’s ability to handle large data volumes and variety.
• Collaboration: Tools allowing different team members to collaborate on projects.
• Ease of use: A user-friendly interface that is intuitive and easy to navigate.
• Supported data types: support for different modalities such as video, image, audio, and text.
• Automation: AI-based labeling for speeding up annotation processes.
• Other functionalities for streamlining the annotation workflow: including integration with cloud services and advanced annotation methods for complex scenarios.

Data Annotation Companies: Key Takeaways

CV applications are driving the current industrial landscape by innovating fields like medical imaging, robotics, retail, etc. However, CV’s rapid expansion into these domains calls for robust data annotation tools and services to build high-quality training data.

Below are a few key points regarding data annotation companies in 2024.

• Security is key: With data privacy regulations becoming stricter globally, companies offering annotation solutions must have compliance certifications to ensure data protection.
• Scalability: Annotation companies should offer scalable tools to handle the ever-increasing data volume and variety.
• Top annotation companies in 2024: SuperAnnotate, Encord, and Kili are the top 3 companies that provide robust labeling platforms and services.