Vendor profile · Directory · Platform
Labelbox
The platform pick: run annotation in-house on published usage pricing, and bolt on expert services (Alignerr) only where you need them.
| Model | Platform (Catalog, Annotate, Model) + expert services via Alignerr |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2018 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA |
| Pricing | Published — Free tier (500 LBU/mo); Starter $0.10 per LBU; Enterprise custom |
| Website | labelbox.com |
What Labelbox does
Labelbox was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Manu Sharma, Brian Rieger and Dan Rasmuson. Its platform has three products — Catalog for data curation, Annotate for human and model-assisted labeling, and Model for evaluation — and its Alignerr community supplies expert labeling services on top.
It is one of the only vendors here with published pricing: per its documentation, a Free tier includes 500 Labelbox Units (LBU) per month, the Starter tier is a fixed $0.10 per LBU, and Enterprise is sales-quoted. The company has raised $189 million and reports being profitable.
Strengths
- Published usage pricing and a real free tier — the platform exception in this market
- Mature tooling across curation, annotation and evaluation
- Alignerr expert services available without changing platforms
Considerations
- Usage pricing rewards modeling your LBU consumption before scaling — complex asset types consume more units per row
- The marketing pricing page was retired; current rates live in the documentation
- Human-data services are add-ons billed separately from the platform subscription
Other platforms in the directory
- Prolific — The transparency benchmark: a self-serve participant platform with fully published pricing and an enforced participant pay floor.
- Kili Technology — A Paris-built enterprise platform for annotation and LLM evaluation, sold to regulated industries that need data quality controls more than raw labeling volume.
- SuperAnnotate — A multimodal annotation platform that has grown an expert-services arm (SME) hiring domain specialists for AI training and evaluation work.
- Encord — A data infrastructure platform — Annotate, Index, Active — built for physical AI: robotics, autonomous vehicles and sensor-heavy multimodal data.
- CVAT — The open-source annotation workhorse: born at Intel, now run by CVAT.ai as a free self-hosted Community edition plus paid cloud and enterprise tiers with published prices.
- Label Studio (HumanSignal) — The most popular open-source labeling tool — multimodal by design — with HumanSignal selling cloud and enterprise editions and optional expert data services.
- Lightly AI — An ETH Zurich spin-off built on one idea: label less, but label the right data — curation and self-supervised pretraining first, annotation second.
- BasicAI — A platform-and-services company built around multi-sensor data — LiDAR fusion annotation for automotive and robotics is its home ground.
- V7 — The London platform company behind Darwin — AI-assisted visual annotation with a low-cost self-serve entry — now also selling document-workflow agents as V7 Go.
- Dataloop — An Israeli data-pipeline and annotation platform with a strong autonomous-vehicle story — acquired by Dell Technologies in December 2025.
Frequently asked questions
What does Labelbox do?
The platform pick: run annotation in-house on published usage pricing, and bolt on expert services (Alignerr) only where you need them.
How much does Labelbox cost?
Labelbox publishes pricing: Published — Free tier (500 LBU/mo); Starter $0.10 per LBU; Enterprise custom. Confirm current terms on the vendor's site before budgeting, as vendors change plans.
Who is Labelbox best for?
ML teams that want to own their annotation workflow on a platform with transparent usage pricing, with expert services available as an add-on.
Who should not use Labelbox?
Buyers who want a vendor to own delivery end-to-end — fully managed work sits in the Enterprise tier and is priced by sales.
Sources
- Labelbox pricing, read from its documentation — UsagePricing
- Labelbox review and pricing tiers — TopReviewed
Facts on this page were drawn from the public sources above, checked November 2026. If you spot an error, tell us at the corrections address in the footer — we fix sourced errors and note the change.
Profile last updated: November 8, 2026 · How we write profiles · Corrections: contact@bestdataannotation.com