CVAT

What is CVAT?

CVAT Community is the free, self-hosted edition of CVAT, a web tool for annotating images, video, audio and 3D point clouds with boxes, polygons, masks, keypoints and tracks. Teams use it to build and manage datasets for computer-vision models, with projects, tasks, jobs, quality review, cloud storage, webhooks, and import/export in common dataset formats. Serverless functions (Nuclio) can pre-label data with models such as SAM or YOLO.

Where it fits in a 10–200 person business

• Label product or defect photos to train a visual inspection model
• Annotate CCTV or dashcam video with object tracks for a detection model
• Pre-label images with SAM or YOLO and have staff correct the results

These use cases are our editorial suggestions, not claims made by the project.

Can a business use CVAT? (license)

This is a plain-English summary of the license text, not legal advice. Third-party models you run with it have their own licenses.

Data & compliance: does CVAT phone home?

Checked against the project's own docs and repository on Nov 4, 2026. "Not documented" means we could not find the answer in official sources; it does not mean the feature is missing or that no data is sent. Third-party services you connect (model APIs, vector databases, search engines) have their own data policies. Compare all apps.

What hardware does CVAT need?

The project does not publish a minimum CPU/RAM figure, so we leave the official value blank rather than guess.

GPU: Not needed for manual annotation. Auto-annotation functions can be deployed on CPU (serverless/deploy_cpu.sh); GPU support requires the NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

No CPU, RAM or disk figures are published in the Community installation guide.

Source: docs.cvat.ai/docs/administration/community/advanced/installation_automatic_annotation/

How much does it cost to host CVAT per month?

How to deploy CVAT

Method: Docker Compose

git clone https://github.com/cvat-ai/cvat
cd cvat
export CVAT_HOST=FQDN_or_YOUR-IP-ADDRESS
docker compose up -d
docker exec -it cvat_server bash -ic 'python3 ~/manage.py createsuperuser'

From the official instructions: docs.cvat.ai/docs/administration/community/basics/installation/. Always check the source for the current version before you run it.

Known gotchas when self-hosting CVAT

• Newly registered users have no rights, not even to view tasks, until a superuser created with createsuperuser assigns them groups in the admin panel. source
• Set CVAT_HOST to the server's domain or IP before starting, or CVAT is not reachable from other machines. source
• All data lives in Docker volumes (cvat_db, cvat_data, and others); back them up with the documented procedure before upgrades. source
• SSO with OIDC or SAML is documented for the Enterprise edition; Community supports LDAP login. The install guide names Google Chrome as the only supported browser. source

Alternatives in Data labeling & vector databases

• LlamaFactory Fine-tune 100+ open LLMs and VLMs from a web UI or CLI, without writing training code.
• Meilisearch Fast search engine with full-text, semantic and hybrid (AI) search, shipped as a single binary.
• Milvus Scalable open-source vector database for semantic search and RAG at large data volumes.
• Qdrant Fast vector database for semantic search and RAG back-ends.
• Chroma Open-source embedding database for vector, full-text and metadata search in RAG apps.
• Label Studio Data labeling tool for text, images, audio and video, used to build and evaluate AI models.
• Typesense In-memory search engine with typo-tolerant keyword, vector, semantic and hybrid search.
• pgvector Open-source PostgreSQL extension for vector similarity search, next to your relational data.
• Weaviate Open-source vector database with hybrid search, RAG and multi-tenancy built in.

Sources

• GitHub repository: github.com/cvat-ai/cvat
• Official documentation, Deploy instructions, Gotcha 1, Gotcha 2: docs.cvat.ai/docs/administration/community/basics/installation/
• License text: github.com/cvat-ai/cvat/blob/develop/LICENSE
• Hardware requirements: docs.cvat.ai/docs/administration/community/advanced/installation_automatic_annotation/
• Gotcha 3: docs.cvat.ai/docs/administration/community/advanced/backup_guide/
• Gotcha 4: docs.cvat.ai/docs/account_management/sso/
• Hetzner Cloud pricing (cost estimate): www.hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance
• GitHub stars, commits and releases: GitHub REST API, fetched Nov 4, 2026