Hugging Face

Hugging Face is the main hub for open AI models, datasets and demo apps, with tools and paid compute to train, run and deploy them.

Hugging Face is a platform where the machine learning community hosts and shares models, datasets and applications called Spaces, covering text, image, video, audio and 3D. Anyone can host unlimited public repositories, and more than 50,000 organizations use it, including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Its open-source libraries, such as Transformers, Diffusers, Safetensors and tokenizers, are widely used to build and run AI models. Inference Providers give access to more than 45,000 models through one API with no service fees, and Inference Endpoints and Spaces can run on dedicated GPUs. Paid plans include a personal PRO account, Team and Enterprise plans with access controls and security, and per-terabyte storage.

Hugging Face at a glance

Best for: Software engineer, Researcher
Runs on: Web, API, open source
Pricing: Free; PRO $9/month; Team $20/user/month; GPUs from $0.60/hour
Released: November 2020
Category: AI research tool
Website: huggingface.co

Key features

Hosting for models, datasets and Spaces apps
Transformers, Diffusers and other open-source libraries
Inference Providers API for 45,000+ models
Inference Endpoints on dedicated GPUs
Spaces demo apps, including free ZeroGPU
Team and Enterprise access controls

Use it for

Download an open model to run or fine-tune
Publish a model or dataset for others to use
Build and share an AI demo app

Alternatives to Hugging Face

HuggingChat UI — It provides a customizable open source chat interface for any OpenAI-compatible backend.
Lighteval — Evaluates LLMs across multiple backends with thousands of built-in tasks.
OpenVLHarness — Lifts six multimodal model backbones by 9.7 to 12.6 points across 22 benchmarks.
WeMM Embedding — Provides state-of-the-art performance across multiple multimodal benchmarks.
SAG — It combines model routing, knowledge management, and agent orchestration in private.
OpenResearch — Run parallel research workflows locally or on remote compute.
Paper2Agent — It enables direct interaction with research papers and automatic result reproduction.
WeKnora — Combines RAG, multi-step agents, and automatic Wiki generation in one platform.
Overview — Learn language models by running hands-on experiments without writing scripts
Leaked System Prompt AI — Explores how major AI systems are instructed and configured.
UltraRAG — Build complex RAG workflows using modular MCP components and YAML configuration.
Every number in a tiny GPT — Inspects every lookup, matrix multiplication, and normalisation in a live transformer.

All Hugging Face alternatives