Hugging Face
by Hugging Face, Inc. · huggingface.co ↗
Platform hosting machine learning models, datasets, and demo apps, centered on open-source AI.
model-hub community
- Category
- Platforms & Infrastructure
- Business model
- Freemium
- Availability
- Global
- Launched
- 2016
- Record updated
- 2026-07-30
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- US
Overview
Hugging Face is the central platform of the open-source AI ecosystem, hosting over a million models, datasets, and demo apps. Founded in 2016, it also maintains widely used libraries such as Transformers and offers paid compute and enterprise services. Most hosting and downloads are free.
Key features
- Hub for models, datasets, and Spaces demo apps
- Maintainer of the Transformers and Diffusers libraries
- Inference endpoints and hosted compute
- Enterprise features for private model hosting
Use cases
- Discovering and downloading open models and datasets
- Sharing research artifacts and demos
- Deploying models via managed inference endpoints
Pricing
Public hosting and downloads are free; paid plans cover compute, inference endpoints, and enterprise features.
Frequently asked questions
What is Hugging Face used for?
Hugging Face hosts open models, datasets, and demo apps, and maintains core open-source AI libraries such as Transformers.
Is Hugging Face free?
Yes. Browsing, downloading, and public hosting are free; compute and enterprise services are paid.
Who runs Hugging Face?
Hugging Face is a US-based company founded in 2016 with a large open-source community.
Similar products
- Amazon Bedrock — Managed AWS service for building applications with foundation models from multiple providers via one API.
- Amazon Nova — AWS portfolio of Amazon-built foundation models and services for text, multimodal, speech, custom model building, and UI-automating agents.
- Azure AI Foundry — Microsoft's platform for building, evaluating, and deploying AI applications and agents on Azure.
- Baseten — Platform for deploying and serving machine-learning models as scalable APIs.
- Cerebras — AI compute company whose inference cloud serves open language models on wafer-scale hardware.
- Civitai — Community platform for sharing and discovering open image-generation models, LoRAs, and generated art.
All Hugging Face alternatives → · All Platforms & Infrastructure products →
Sources
This record was last reviewed on 2026-07-30.
Machine-readable record: /api/products/hugging-face.json · Spot an error? Suggest a correction