European Alternatives to Scale AI
Looking for a European alternative to Scale AI? Scale AI, Inc. is a San Francisco company, its website terms are governed by California law, and its Data Engine is sold through demos rather than a public price list.
The European platforms and workforces below cover image, video, LiDAR and text labeling, and several can be installed on your own servers.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA, the UK, Switzerland or Israel, and processes customer data in Europe or Israel. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
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10 European Alternatives to Scale AI
Kili Technology
Expert-in-the-loop labeling and AI evaluation platform
Kognic
Annotation platform and workforce for autonomous driving data
Prodigy
Scriptable self-hosted annotation tool from the spaCy makers
Supervisely
Labeling, data management and model training in one platform
Picsellia
Computer vision MLOps platform with built-in annotation
Lightly
Data curation platform that now also labels and reviews
SentiSight.ai
Pay-as-you-go image labeling and recognition platform
Keylabs
Image, video and 3D annotation platform with a hired-team option
isahit
Managed labeling workforce with a self-serve annotation tool
Innovatiana
Service-led data labeling for fine-tuning, RLHF and evaluation
Key takeaways
- Scale AI, Inc. describes itself as San Francisco-based in its privacy policy, and sells its Data Engine through a demo rather than a public price list.
- Scale's homepage claims that 90 percent of leading generative AI model builders are powered by it, a figure that comes from the vendor and is not independently verified.
- Kili Technology (France) and Picsellia (France) both offer an install on your own infrastructure, which the Scale pages checked do not document.
- Prodigy (Germany) costs $390 as a personal lifetime licence and never connects to its vendor, the sharpest contrast with a managed service.
- Kognic (Sweden) is the closest European match for Scale's autonomy work, annotating camera, LiDAR and radar with a trained workforce.
Why people leave Scale AI
Scale AI, Inc. runs the data labeling business that many AI teams meet first. Its Data Engine covers text, image, video and 3D sensor data, and its generative AI side offers prompt-response generation, RLHF, red teaming and model evaluation. The homepage says 90 percent of the leading generative AI model builders are powered by Scale and that a quarter of its contributors hold advanced degrees. Both are the vendor's own figures, and nobody checks them for you.
The company describes itself in its privacy policy as San Francisco-based, with Scale AI, Inc. as the controller where it acts as one. Its website terms, dated August 2021, are governed by California law, and the platform itself is sold under a separate master services agreement that you only see once a sales process has started. The Data Engine page has one button, Book a Demo, and no price anywhere.
People look past Scale for three practical reasons. Some cannot send clinical images, vehicle footage or internal documents to a US contractor and its subprocessors. Others cannot get a price without a call. And a growing group wants the labeling tool on their own servers, which an annotation service run from San Francisco is not designed to allow.
- The contract is American, and so is the controller Scale AI, Inc. names itself as controller in its privacy policy, and its public legal pages are written under California law. A European buyer gets a processing arrangement that depends on transfer mechanisms rather than GDPR applying directly to the vendor. For raw labeling inputs such as medical scans or camera footage of public roads, many data protection officers would rather not have that dependency to explain.
- No price list, only a demo The Data Engine page on 23 October 2026 offered Book a Demo and nothing else, and the legal list names separate documents for the master services agreement, product terms, end user terms and subprocessors. You learn the real cost and the real terms after the first call. Several European vendors, including Supervisely, Picsellia, Prodigy and SentiSight.ai, print at least one price on their own pages.
- A service built around Scale's own workforce Scale's offer is largely its contributor network, which the vendor says it recruits with care. That is useful when you have no annotators, and awkward when you do: your own experts, an in-house team or a regulated workforce sit outside the product's main design. Tools such as Kili Technology or Prodigy start from the opposite assumption, that the labelers are yours.
- No route to run it on your own servers Nothing on the Scale pages read offers an install on your own infrastructure. Air-gapped work is therefore a conversation with the sales team rather than a documented option. Kili Technology (own Kubernetes), Picsellia (on-premise and air-gapped), Prodigy (your own hardware) and Supervisely Enterprise are the listed European answers.
What you have to replace, not just match
Scale is several products behind one name, so decide which part you actually use before you shop. The annotation side (image, video, text and LiDAR) is where European tools line up most directly. The generative AI side, with RLHF data, red teaming and evaluation sets, maps to fewer of them: Kili Technology for expert-reviewed post-training data, isahit for RLHF workforce management, and Innovatiana for RLHF and evaluation as a managed service.
The part that is hardest to replace is the workforce. Scale supplies contributors on demand and measures them with a built-in worker evaluation pipeline, as one customer quote on the Data Engine page puts it. If your quality depends on that, your replacement is a vendor that supplies people (Kognic, isahit, Innovatiana, or the hired-team options at Keylabs and Supervisely) or a plan to put your own staff on a platform. Software alone does not replace a workforce.
Finally, there are the labels you already own. They should come out as COCO, YOLO or JSON and go into a tool that imports them, and your internal scripts that call the Scale API will need rewriting against whichever tool you choose. Count that work before comparing licence prices.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Kili Technology | Paris, France | Free trial (2 to 5 seats, 100 text or image assets); Grow and Enterprise plans on request | EU (France) |
| #2 | Kognic | Gothenburg, Sweden | Pricing on request | EU (Sweden) |
| #3 | Prodigy | Berlin, Germany | $390 personal lifetime licence; $490 per seat in packs of 5 for companies (excl. tax) | EU (Germany) |
| #4 | Supervisely | Tallinn, Estonia | Community free; Pro from 199 euro per month; Enterprise custom | EU (Estonia) |
| #5 | Picsellia | Toulouse, France | Data Engine from 1,000 euro per month; labeler seats 10 euro per month each; annotation services 9.60 euro per hour | EU (France) |
| #6 | Lightly | Zurich, Switzerland | LightlyStudio free to try; commercial pricing on request via demo | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #7 | SentiSight.ai | Vilnius, Lithuania | EUR 1 per 1,000 labels; EUR 3.6 per hour of training; 20 euro sign-up credit and 5 euro free each month | EU (Lithuania) |
| #8 | Keylabs | Israel | See website (free trial available) | Israel (outside the EU/EEA) |
| #9 | isahit | Saint-Mande, France | Quote on request; small project free to start | EU (France) |
| #10 | Innovatiana | Paris, France | Free quote on request | EU (France) |
How each alternative compares to Scale AI
Best for: Teams with their own domain experts that must show how each label was produced.
Against Scale, Kili Technology flips the labor model. Where Scale supplies contributors, Kili expects your people to label and review, and measures their agreement before anything is exported. Every version of a judgment is stored with its author, which matters when you must document a dataset or an evaluation verdict, and the vendor mentions the EU AI Act on its site.
The contracting party is MYAI SAS in Paris. Image, video, text, audio, OCR and geospatial data are covered, and an own-Kubernetes install needs no internet or root access after set-up. Prices stop at a free trial of 2 to 5 seats and 100 text or image assets, so budgeting still means a call, much like Scale.
What Kili Technology does better than Scale AI
- Own-cluster install, documented
- Audit trail of every label version
- Expert review with agreement scoring
- A French contract under GDPR
Where Kili Technology is a step down from Scale AI
- No supplied workforce at Scale's reach
- Self-hosting is Enterprise only
- Cloud region not stated
Standout against Scale AI. Kili Technology treats review as part of the labeling step, not a separate service you pay for afterwards.
Best for: Automotive manufacturers and suppliers labeling camera, LiDAR and radar data.
Kognic overlaps with the sensor fusion side of Scale and not much else. It was founded in Gothenburg in 2018 as an annotation platform for autonomy and works on camera, LiDAR and radar together, with annotators the vendor says are trained in driving data and quality gates at each step.
Its terms are concluded with Kognic AB, and the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection is the named supervisory authority. Newer work on trajectory ranking and language grounding for vision-language driving models points where Scale's generative offer also goes. There is no price list and no self-serve plan on the pages checked.
What Kognic does better than Scale AI
- Depth on driving sensor data
- Swedish contract and supervisory authority
- Workforce trained on autonomy
Where Kognic is a step down from Scale AI
- Useless outside automotive and robotics
- No published price or self-serve account
Standout against Scale AI. Kognic is the one European vendor in this list that treats LiDAR, radar and camera as a single annotation job.
Best for: Data scientists who label their own text and images and want no vendor access.
Prodigy is the sharpest contrast to Scale on this page. There is no workforce, no platform and no account: ExplosionAI, the Berlin company behind spaCy, sells a Python-installed web application that runs on your hardware and, as the buy page states, never connects to the vendor. Annotation flows are scripts, and storage is SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.
It costs $390 for a personal lifetime licence or $490 per seat in packs of 5, excluding tax, with 12 months of upgrades. For a research group or a team with two annotators that can be less than a month of a managed service. For a project that needs 50 outsourced annotators it is no answer at all.
What Prodigy does better than Scale AI
- Price: one-off, public
- Zero vendor access to your data
- Control over the annotation interface
Where Prodigy is a step down from Scale AI
- No annotators and no workforce management
- Needs Python skills
- English-law licence, dollar prices
Standout against Scale AI. Prodigy keeps working if the vendor never answers an email again, because nothing in it phones home.
Best for: Computer vision teams that want a free start and a self-hosted route later.
Supervisely answers the two complaints about Scale that are easiest to test: you can start without talking to anyone, and the entry price is printed. The Community edition is free with 5 GB of storage, and Pro begins at 199 euro per month, according to the pricing page.
The Tallinn company contracts as Supervisely OU under Estonian law. Image, video, LiDAR and DICOM tools sit in one product next to data management and neural network training, and Enterprise can be self-hosted. Video, medical and point cloud features are paid add-ons, inactive projects in free teams are archived after 30 days, and the cloud region is not stated.
What Supervisely does better than Scale AI
- A free tier and a printed entry price
- DICOM and LiDAR in the same tool
- A self-hosted Enterprise edition
Where Supervisely is a step down from Scale AI
- Add-on pricing complicates budgets
- Weak for text labeling
- Cloud region not stated
Standout against Scale AI. Supervisely lets a small vision team label, manage and train for free before any invoice exists.
Best for: Industrial vision teams that also need training, versioning and monitoring.
Picsellia is where Scale's annotation work turns into a pipeline decision. The Toulouse company, founded in 2020, ships labeling with SAM and Grounding DINO pre-labeling, a review flow that locks accepted annotations, and the later steps of training, deployment and monitoring.
Prices are public: 1,000 euro per month or 12,000 euro per year for the Data Engine module with three seats, 500 euro per month per extra user, labeler seats at 10 euro and annotation services at 9.60 euro per hour. SaaS uses EU and US data centres, while hybrid and on-premise installs (air-gapped included) keep data on your side. Text is not covered.
What Picsellia does better than Scale AI
- Pipeline beyond labeling
- Documented air-gapped deployment
- Prices stated in euros
Where Picsellia is a step down from Scale AI
- High entry price for a lone annotator
- SaaS includes US data centres
- No text labeling
Standout against Scale AI. Picsellia is the only option here where the same vendor will label the data, train the model and watch it in production.
Best for: Teams with large unlabeled image or video archives and a labeling budget to protect.
Lightly attacks a different cost than the others: not the price per label but the number of labels. Embedding search and sampling strategies for diversity, deduplication, outliers and class balance pick which items go to annotators, and labeling and QA happen in the same grid afterwards.
Lightly AG is a Zurich company registered as CHE-286.361.875 and the terms are governed by Swiss law, which sits outside the EEA. Export covers COCO, YOLO, Pascal VOC and KITTI, so labels can leave. Prices are on request, there is no managed workforce, and text data is out of scope.
What Lightly does better than Scale AI
- Cuts labeling volume before spending
- Works in front of any labeling vendor
- Cloud, hybrid and on-premise listed
Where Lightly is a step down from Scale AI
- Not a replacement for supplied annotators
- Vision data only
- No published price
Standout against Scale AI. Lightly is useful even if you stay with Scale, because it shrinks the batch you send.
Best for: Small teams labeling image datasets occasionally who dislike subscriptions.
SentiSight.ai answers Scale with a price you can read in a wallet: 1 euro per 1,000 labels, 3.6 euro per hour of training, a 20 euro sign-up credit and 5 euro free every month, which the vendor equates to 5,000 labels. There is no sales call in the way.
Neurotechnology operates it from Vilnius under Lithuanian law. Labels can be downloaded for offline use, and for classification a similarity search proposes labels for images you have not touched yet. It handles images only, cannot be self-hosted and states no data region, and team management stops at project sharing.
What SentiSight.ai does better than Scale AI
- Per-label price visible up front
- No contract or minimum
- Monthly free credit
Where SentiSight.ai is a step down from Scale AI
- Images only
- No self-hosting or stated data region
- Thin team and review features
Standout against Scale AI. SentiSight.ai is the only option in this list you can pay for by the thousand labels.
Best for: Vision teams that want a platform and an optional hired team from one Israeli vendor.
Keylabs offers something close to Scale's combination of software and people, at a smaller footprint. The platform labels image, video and 3D data with YOLO and SAM assistance and multi-layer QA, and the site has a Hire a team page for outsourced annotators.
The contracting party is Keylabs A.I Ltd, registered in Israel, which this directory has counted as European since 22 October 2026. The pricing page returned not-found on 23 October 2026, the legal pages date from 2020, and the GDPR and ISO 27001 statements are vendor claims. A free trial is the way to test it.
What Keylabs does better than Scale AI
- Platform and hired team in one account
- Free trial available
Where Keylabs is a step down from Scale AI
- Israeli entity outside the EU
- Pricing and data region unclear
- Outdated legal pages
Standout against Scale AI. Keylabs lets you start self-serve and hire annotators later without changing platform.
Best for: Teams that want a vetted outsourced workforce without building the tooling.
Isahit competes with Scale on the people side. It recruits and tests workers, matches them to projects by skill and language, tracks quality in real time and handles payroll, and it adds LLM fine-tuning, RAG optimisation and RLHF workforce management.
Isahit SAS is registered at RCS Creteil under 812 570 604 and French law applies. The homepage offers a small labeling project for free, which is the cheapest way to test quality. Pricing is by quote, the tool is simpler than dedicated platforms, and the vendor says many workers are in developing countries, so the work is not done in Europe.
What isahit does better than Scale AI
- Quote and test project, not a demo wall
- French contract and courts
- Worker testing and quality tracking described
Where isahit is a step down from Scale AI
- Simpler tool than a platform
- Workforce largely outside Europe
- No public price
Standout against Scale AI. Isahit offers a free small project to judge annotator quality before you sign.
Best for: AI teams that want finished datasets delivered and need no tooling of their own.
Innovatiana is the nearest thing in Europe to buying Scale's generative data service, minus the platform. The site describes teams that are vetted, trained and managed by Innovatiana staff, delivery for pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF and evaluation, and a pilot that can start in under 72 hours, according to the vendor.
Innovatiana SAS, founded in 2021, is registered under SIREN 913 684 668 and gives a Paris address. It describes itself as French and Malagasy, so some of the work is done in Madagascar. There is no software account, no price list (a free quote instead) and no data region on the pages checked.
What Innovatiana does better than Scale AI
- Managed delivery with a French contract
- Covers RLHF, moderation and medical data
- Quote without a demo
Where Innovatiana is a step down from Scale AI
- No software for your own annotators
- Part of the work in Madagascar
- No price or hosting information
Standout against Scale AI. Innovatiana is a service only, so the choice is made on its people rather than its interface.
What actually breaks when you switch
Export is the first job. Pull every labeled set out of Scale in a format your next tool reads, and check a sample by hand: class names, coordinate conventions and the handling of empty frames differ between COCO, YOLO and Pascal VOC, and a silent mismatch ruins a training run later. Lightly lists those formats and more, Prodigy exports JSON, and Kili lists a Python SDK and API.
Then comes the workforce and the contract. A move from Scale to a platform means someone on your side now manages annotators, guidelines and review, which is a job rather than a feature. A move to a European managed vendor means rewriting guidelines for different people and re-running calibration. Keep the Scale agreement alive until the pilot passes, check the notice period and deletion terms in it, and expect your API scripts to be rewritten.
Can a European company really do what Scale does at the same scale?
For most teams, yes, and for a few, no. If your project is a few hundred thousand images, a document set or a driving dataset, the European platforms handle the tooling and, for the managed vendors, the people. Kognic, isahit and Innovatiana each state they run vetted teams, and Kili Technology gives your own experts review tooling with agreement scoring.
What none of them publish is a figure anywhere near Scale's claimed reach with frontier model builders. If you need thousands of expert contributors recruited within weeks across many languages, ask each candidate for a reference at that volume. Where an answer does not exist, a hybrid works: keep Scale for the burst and move the sensitive core to a European tool.
What should I ask a European vendor that Scale did not tell me?
Ask where the files sit and who can open them. Picsellia says its SaaS uses EU and US data centres. Kili, Supervisely, SentiSight.ai, Kognic, Keylabs, isahit and Innovatiana state no region on the pages checked. For the managed vendors, add where the annotators are: isahit says its workforce is largely outside Europe, and Innovatiana says part of its work is done in Madagascar.
Then ask for the deletion procedure, the subprocessor list and the data processing agreement before the pilot, not after. A good European answer is concrete: Prodigy has no vendor access at all, Kili and Picsellia can sit inside your cluster, and Lightly lists cloud, hybrid and on-premise. Anything vaguer deserves a clause in the contract.
Which one to pick
Pick Kili Technology if you want one platform for most data types, your own experts reviewing, and the option to run it inside your own Kubernetes cluster. Pick Kognic if the work is driving data. Pick Prodigy if the annotators are data scientists and the goal is to keep every file on your own machines, and Supervisely if you want a free start with a published price afterwards.
Pick isahit or Innovatiana when what you buy is people, and pilot with the same items you sent to Scale so you can compare agreement directly. Keep Scale where you need a volume and breadth that no European vendor here documents, or where the data is neither sensitive nor regulated. Using Lightly in front of either is a sensible extra: it cuts the batch that you pay anyone to label.
Frequently Asked Questions
Kili Technology from France is the general-purpose choice, with image, video, text, audio and OCR labeling, expert review and an own-Kubernetes install. Kognic from Sweden suits driving data, Prodigy from Germany suits teams that label in code on their own hardware, and Supervisely from Estonia gives a free tier and 199 euro per month Pro plan. Which one fits depends on data type and whether you need annotators supplied.
Not on the pages read on 23 October 2026. The Data Engine page offers a demo booking and no price, and the terms for the platform sit in a master services agreement shared in the sales process. By contrast, Prodigy lists $390 and $490 licences, SentiSight.ai 1 euro per 1,000 labels, Supervisely 199 euro per month and Picsellia 1,000 euro per month for the Data Engine module.
Yes. Kognic supplies a workforce trained on autonomy data, isahit and Innovatiana run managed teams from France, Keylabs and Supervisely sell hired annotation teams alongside their software, and Picsellia sells annotation services at 9.60 euro per hour. Isahit and Innovatiana both say part of the work happens outside Europe, so check that before assuming European annotators.
You can with Prodigy, which runs on your own hardware, with Kili Technology on your own Kubernetes (an Enterprise add-on), with Picsellia on-premise or air-gapped, and with Supervisely Enterprise. Lightly also lists on-premise deployment. Kognic, SentiSight.ai, Keylabs, isahit and Innovatiana do not offer it.
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