Object detection, instance segmentation, keypoints, classification
Support for SAM-2-powered label assistant in the annotation interface.
When comparing VGG Image Annotator (VIA) to Roboflow Annotate, both support essential vision tasks such as bounding boxes, polygons, instance segmentation, and classification. But they cater to very different scales and workflows. VIA, created by Oxford’s VGG, is a minimalist, browser-based tool perfect for quick, single-image annotation on a per-user basis. It requires no installation and works offline. While Roboflow Annotate is a full-featured SaaS platform offering collaborative annotation with dataset analytics, annotation history, semantic search, image augmentation, and AI-powered assistance via Foundation Model tools such as SAM‑2, all wrapped into a streamlined, production-ready vision workflow.
Here are the key differences:
VIA is great if you want a fast, offline, browser-based tool for lightweight annotation. Roboflow Annotate is designed for end-to-end vision workflows, making annotation fast with AI, analytics, collaboration, and seamless model integration.