Data Annotation Tools

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Text Annotation Tools

Text annotation tools label words and documents for natural language processing: named entities, categories, relations between entities, and more and more often people's ratings of model answers. These 14 tools document entity or span labeling, from free open-source projects to enterprise platforms.

Facts checked Nov 8, 2026

INCEpTIONTOOL moved to the Eclipse FoundationORG, and its release 42.2VERSION came out on October 27, 2026DATE.

One sentence with four entity spans, labeled the way a NER tool shows them. The facts in it come from the INCEpTION project's own release page.

14 text annotation tools

Facts checked against each tool's own docs, pricing page or repository on Nov 8, 2026. Order: most of our 8 documented checks first. No tool paid for its place. How we compare.

  1. 1

    UBIAI

    UBIAI · Commercial

    8/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Spans, Relations, CategoriesExports Amazon Comprehend, spaCy 2 and spaCy 3 binary, relations, Stanford CoreNLP, IOB
    Runs
    On your own server, on private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises), or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    Start: $0 a month, one user, 100 documents a month. Essential: $74 a month. Growth: $299 a month.
    The catch
    LLM pre-labeling needs your own OpenAI API key, and its annotation docs show they were last updated about two years ago.
  2. 2

    Datasaur Data Studio

    Datasaur · Commercial

    8/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, TranscriptsExports JSONL, CSV, TSV_NON_IOB, CoNLL_2003
    Runs
    On your own server or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    Free: personal workspace, 5,000 labels a year. Starter: from $5,000 a year through sales, up to 3 users. Growth: from $24,000 a year.
    The catch
    Paid plans go through sales, self-hosting is Enterprise only, and Datasaur's main site now leads with private LLM projects.
  3. 3

    Label Studio

    HumanSignal · Open core (Apache-2.0)

    8/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, TranscriptsExports CSV, TSV, CoNLL 2003
    Runs
    On your own server, on private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises), or in the vendor's cloudLast release Sep 29, 2026
    Price
    Community Edition: free and open source (Apache-2.0), self-hosted. Starter Cloud: $99 a month plus $49 a month per extra user, up to 12 users. Enterprise: by quote.
    The catch
    Reviewer assignment, agreement metrics and roles are not in the free Community Edition; they start with Starter Cloud.
  4. 4

    Labellerr

    Tensor Matics, Inc. · Commercial

    8/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Categories, TranscriptsExports CSV
    Runs
    On private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises) or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    Free Researcher plan for students and researchers (by application): 2,500 data credits, 1 seat. Pro: $9,999 a year. Enterprise: by quote.
    The catch
    DICOM, LiDAR and NIfTI files are listed only on the custom-priced Enterprise plan, and its FAQ quotes a Pro price of $499 a month while the pricing table says $9,999 a year.
  5. 5

    INCEpTION

    Eclipse Foundation incubating project, originally developed at the UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt · Open source (Apache-2.0)

    7/8 checks

    Now an Eclipse Foundation project, named Eclipse INCEpTION.

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, CoreferenceExports UIMA CAS XMI, UIMA CAS JSON, CoNLL-U
    Runs
    On your computer, on your own server, or on private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises)Last release Oct 27, 2026
    Price
    Free and open source (Apache-2.0), self-hosted or as a desktop app.
    The catch
    The PDF editor needs a text layer, so scanned PDFs must be OCRed first, and their text can sit slightly off the page image.
  6. 6

    Kili Technology

    Kili Technology · Commercial

    7/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, Rankings and ratings, Transcripts
    Runs
    On private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises) or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    Free Trial plan: $0 a month, 2 to 5 seats, 100 assets (5 for video). Grow and Enterprise: custom pricing, no numbers printed.
    The catch
    Each project tops out at 25,000 assets, so bigger datasets get split across projects.
  7. 7

    BasicAI

    BasicAI · Commercial

    7/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations
    Runs
    On private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises)
    Price
    Private-cloud deployment from $6,600 a year, sized per company. No free plan on the pricing page.
    The catch
    Self-serve cloud plans are gone from the pricing page, while its docs still describe a free cloud plan, so confirm what you're buying.
  8. 8

    Prodigy

    Explosion · Paid license

    6/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Spans, Relations, Categories, Coreference, TranscriptsExports JSONL, spaCy binary via data-to-spacy
    Runs
    On your computer, on your own server, or on private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises)
    Price
    Personal license: $390 once. Company: $490 per seat, sold in packs of 5. Both include 12 months of upgrades. No free version.
    The catch
    No user accounts or project management; its docs say it leaves that kind of feature out on purpose.
  9. 9

    doccano

    doccano open-source project (GitHub org doccano) · Open source (MIT)

    6/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, Text to text, TranscriptsExports JSONL, CSV
    Runs
    On your own serverLast release Jan 11, 2026
    Price
    Free and open source (MIT); you host it yourself.
    The catch
    NER projects export only as JSONL; there's no CoNLL or spaCy export, and no agreement scoring in the docs.
  10. 10

    Argilla

    Argilla (joined Hugging Face, announced June 13, 2024) · Open source (Apache-2.0)

    6/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Categories, Rankings and ratingsExports Hugging Face Hub dataset, Hugging Face datasets object
    Runs
    On your own serverLast release Nov 2, 2026
    Price
    Free and open source (Apache-2.0); deploy on Hugging Face Spaces or your own servers.
    The catch
    Its README says no new features will be added, though bug fixes and patches still ship.
  11. 11

    Dataloop

    Dataloop Ltd., part of Dell Technologies · Commercial

    6/8 checks

    Renamed Dell Data Orchestration Engine on March 30, 2026.

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, Rankings and ratings, Transcripts
    Runs
    On private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises) or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    No public prices: billing is metered on time spent in the labeling tool, stored items and compute. The only free option is an academic license.
    The catch
    Its COCO, YOLO and Pascal VOC exports cover images only; everything else exports as its own JSON.
  12. 12

    Encord

    Encord (Cord Technologies, Inc.) · Commercial

    6/8 checks

    Labels
    Spans, Relations, Categories, Transcripts
    Runs
    On private infrastructure (VPC or on-premises) or in the vendor's cloud
    Price
    No prices printed for the Starter, Team or Enterprise plans. No free plan is listed.
    The catch
    Point clouds, DICOM and NIfTI are add-ons on the Team plan and come with Enterprise, where VPC and on-prem installs are add-ons too.
  13. 13

    Labelbox

    Labelbox, Inc. · Commercial

    5/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, Rankings and ratings, Transcripts
    Runs
    In the vendor's cloud
    Price
    Free plan: 500 Labelbox Units (LBU) a month, up to 30 users. Starter: $0.10 per LBU, and a labeled image costs 1 LBU. Enterprise: by quote. Prices come from its docs; labelbox.com/pricing returned a 404 on Nov 8, 2026.
    The catch
    Cloud only, with data stored in the US; Labelbox retired its on-premise version, moving the last customers off by August 2023, and labels export as Labelbox JSON.
  14. 14

    SuperAnnotate

    SuperAnnotate · Commercial

    5/8 checks

    Labels
    Entities (NER), Relations, Categories, TranscriptsExports SuperAnnotate JSONL, SuperAnnotate CSV
    Runs
    In the vendor's cloud
    Price
    No prices printed: Starter, Pro and Enterprise all go through a demo request. No free plan is listed.
    The catch
    Cloud only, and labels export as SuperAnnotate JSON, JSONL or CSV; COCO needs its Python SDK converter.

NER annotation tools

NER annotation tools mark named entities, such as people, companies, places and dates, as spans of text with a label, and they differ most in how they speed that up and what they export. INCEpTION's recommenders retrain as you annotate and can link entities to your own knowledge base; Prodigy uses active learning and ties closely to spaCy; UBIAI exports spaCy, IOB, Stanford CoreNLP and Amazon Comprehend formats. On exports, Label Studio and Datasaur write the CoNLL 2003 format from the shared NER task of that name, while doccano saves NER projects only as JSONL.

Text annotation software for teams

Text annotation software for teams adds roles, review and agreement scores, which matter as soon as two people label the same data, and the data labeling platforms page compares those review steps across every kind of data. INCEpTION has a curation page where a curator merges several annotators' work and measures agreement with scores such as Fleiss' kappa; Datasaur has a reviewer mode for label conflicts and agreement reports; UBIAI runs agreement tasks for entities, relations and document classes; and Prodigy's review recipe merges annotators' answers, though Prodigy itself has no user accounts.

Free and open-source text annotation tools

Free and open-source text annotation tools cover most NLP labeling needs if you can host them. doccano (MIT license) handles classification, NER and text-to-text tasks on your own server; INCEpTION (Apache-2.0), now an Eclipse Foundation project, handles layered annotation such as entities, relations and coreference; Label Studio's Community Edition (Apache-2.0) covers text next to images and audio; and Argilla (Apache-2.0) collects feedback for LLM work, though its README says no new features will be added. UBIAI's Start plan and Datasaur's free workspace give hosted options at no cost, with document and label limits.

Labeling LLM data: ratings, rankings and chats

Labeling LLM data means collecting people's judgments on model output, such as rating an answer, ranking two answers or correcting a chat turn. Argilla offers ranking, rating and free-text questions; Labelbox and Dataloop include ranking for chat data; Kili Technology lists LLM response ranking as a private beta; Datasaur handles conversational labeling; and Label Studio supports chat labeling in its paid editions.

Text annotation tools FAQ

These text annotation tools FAQ answers use the same docs, pricing pages and repositories as the list.

What is text annotation in NLP?

Text annotation in NLP is adding labels to text so a language model can learn from it: categories for whole documents, entity spans for names and dates, links between entities, or ratings of model answers.

Which tool is best for NER annotation?

The best tool for NER annotation depends on how you work. For a free self-hosted tool, doccano covers classification, NER and text-to-text tasks, and INCEpTION adds relations, coreference and links to knowledge bases; for a scriptable tool tied to spaCy, Prodigy; and for a hosted platform with agreement scores, Datasaur Data Studio or UBIAI.

Is doccano still maintained?

Yes, doccano is still maintained: its latest release, v1.8.5, came out on January 11, 2026, and the repository is not archived.

What format should text annotations be exported in?

Text annotations are most often exported as JSONL, CSV or CoNLL for NER, or in a library's own format such as spaCy's binary files. Choose the format your training code reads, and check the tool supports it for your task type, since some tools export NER only as JSONL.

Can an LLM label text for me?

An LLM can draft text labels for you to review in several tools: UBIAI pre-labels with GPT models through your own OpenAI key, Datasaur offers LLM-assisted labeling, Prodigy runs LLM recipes through spacy-llm, and INCEpTION has experimental LLM recommenders.

Sources for this comparison

The sources for this comparison are the tools' own pages: 247 pages from 14 tools, read on Nov 8, 2026. They are listed as plain text, because we link a tool only when it gives us a referral link we disclose.

Show the 247 source pages
  • UBIAI: ubiai.tools, ubiai.gitbook.io/ubiai-documentation, ubiai.tools/pricing-ubiaiv2, ubiai.gitbook.io/ubiai-documentation/upload-documents.md, ubiai.tools/r1-ocr-annotation-feature, ubiai.tools/r1-auto-labeling and 5 more
  • Datasaur Data Studio: datasaur.ai, datasaur.ai/pricing, datasaur.ai/studio, docs.datasaur.ai, datasaur.ai/studio/pricing, docs.datasaur.ai/deployment/self-hosted.md and 8 more
  • Label Studio: labelstud.io, api.github.com/repos/HumanSignal/label-studio, api.github.com/repos/HumanSignal/label-studio/releases/latest, labelstud.io/guide/label_studio_compare, raw.githubusercontent.com/HumanSignal/label-studio/develop/README.md, humansignal.com/pricing and 4 more
  • Labellerr: labellerr.com/pricing, docs.labellerr.com/changelog.md, docs.labellerr.com/product-releases/september-2026.md, labellerr.com/faq, labellerr.com/enterprise, docs.labellerr.com/getting-started/introduction.md and 24 more
  • INCEpTION: api.github.com/repos/inception-project/inception/releases/latest, eclipse-inception.github.io, inception-project.github.io, api.github.com/repos/inception-project/inception, eclipse-inception.github.io/eclipse, eclipse-inception.github.io/downloads and 1 more
  • Kili Technology: kili-technology.com/pricing, docs.kili-technology.com/changelog/november-4th-2026.md, kili-technology.com, docs.kili-technology.com/docs/labeling-audio-assets.md, docs.kili-technology.com/docs/labeling-llm-data.md, docs.kili-technology.com/docs/hosting.md and 29 more
  • BasicAI: basic.ai/basicai-data-annotation-platform/pricing, docs.basic.ai/docs/subscription.md, docs.basic.ai/changelog, basic.ai, docs.basic.ai/docs/gen-ai.md, docs.basic.ai/docs/class.md and 9 more
  • Prodigy: prodi.gy/docs/changelog, prodi.gy/docs, prodi.gy/buy, prodi.gy/docs/install, prodi.gy/docs/deployment, prodi.gy/docs/recipes and 3 more
  • doccano: raw.githubusercontent.com/doccano/doccano/master/README.md, api.github.com/repos/doccano/doccano/releases/latest, api.github.com/repos/doccano/doccano, raw.githubusercontent.com/doccano/doccano/master/backend/projects/models.py, doccano.github.io/doccano/advanced/auto_labelling_config, raw.githubusercontent.com/doccano/doccano/master/backend/config/settings/base.py and 5 more
  • Argilla: raw.githubusercontent.com/argilla-io/argilla/develop/README.md, api.github.com/repos/argilla-io/argilla/releases/latest, api.github.com/repos/argilla-io/argilla, argilla.io/blog/argilla-joins-hugggingface, docs.argilla.io/latest/getting_started/faq, docs.argilla.io/latest/getting_started/quickstart and 7 more
  • Dataloop: docs.dataloop.ai/docs/platform-release-notes.md, dataloop.ai, dataloop.ai/platform, docs.dataloop.ai/docs/home.md, dataloop.ai/solutions/data-annotation, docs.dataloop.ai/docs/data-annotation-overview.md and 24 more
  • Encord: encord.com/pricing, docs.encord.com/release-notes/releasenotes-2026.md, docs.encord.com/platform-documentation/Other/deployment-options.md, docs.encord.com/platform-documentation/General/general-supported-data.md, docs.encord.com/platform-documentation/Annotate/annotate-ontologies/annotate-ontologies.md, docs.encord.com/platform-documentation/Annotate/automated-labeling/annotate-sam.md and 11 more
  • Labelbox: docs.labelbox.com/horizon/release-notes.md, labelbox.com, docs.labelbox.com/llms.txt, labelbox.com/products/horizon, docs.labelbox.com/horizon/guides/deprecations.md, docs.labelbox.com/horizon/guides/image-editor.md and 18 more
  • SuperAnnotate: doc.superannotate.com/changelog/october-11-2026, doc.superannotate.com/docs/faq-data, trust.superannotate.com, superannotate.com/blog/superannotate-nvidia-enterprise-ai-reference-architecture, superannotate.com/pricing, superannotateai.github.io/custom-tools-docs and 15 more