LightlyStudio is an app for curating, annotating, checking, evaluating, and managing computer-vision datasets. Its free open-source version is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. It computes embeddings and supports metadata filters, text and image similarity search, deduplication, outlier detection, and class balancing. Teams can annotate images and video, use model-assisted labeling plugins, and evaluate models with a confusion matrix and per-sample metrics. It reads media from Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage, and supports annotation formats including COCO, YOLO, Pascal VOC, and YouTube-VIS. Users can export complete datasets or filtered subsets in those formats or CSV. The Python API can index and query datasets, slice samples, add annotations and tags, run sampling, and start the GUI. The local application runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, supports x86 and ARM processors, and requires Python 3.9 or later. Enterprise adds collaboration, role-based permissions, and managed cloud credentials through hosted or on-premise deployment.
Who it is for
LightlyStudio suits computer-vision practitioners managing datasets who need curation, image or video annotation, model evaluation, or a Python API. Teams needing collaboration and managed credentials can consider its Enterprise options.
What is good
- Free open-source version uses Apache License 2.0.
- Supports image and video annotation.
- Exports full datasets or filtered subsets.
- Python API can index and query datasets.
- Local app supports Windows, Linux, and macOS.
What to know first
- Open Source plan has no customer support.
- Open Source plan has no team collaboration.
- Local application requires Python 3.9 or later.
Verdict
LightlyStudio brings dataset curation, annotation, evaluation, and management together, with both GUI and Python API workflows. The open-source plan omits customer support and team collaboration.
LightlyStudio plans and pricing
All plansCompared on data labeling software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Image annotation
- Yes
- Audio/video annotation
- Yes
- Model-assisted labeling
- Yes
- Review workflow
- Yes
- API or SDK access
- Yes
- Deployment
- both
