Lilac vs Unstructured vs Hugging Face vs Weights & Biases
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Lilac
Archived open-source dataset curation tool, acquired by Databricks
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Unstructured
Open-source and hosted document parsing for LLM-ready data
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Hugging Face
The open AI hub for models, datasets and demos, being acquired by NVID...
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Weights & Biases
The near-default ML experiment tracker, now part of CoreWeave Forge
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.5 / 10 | 7.4 / 10 | 8.5 / 10 | 8 / 10 |
| Capability | — | — | ||
| Value for money | — | — | ||
| Ease of use | — | — | ||
| ASEAN readiness | — | — | ||
| API quality | — | — | ||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free: archived Apache-2.0 code on GitHub (databricks/lilac) and PyPI (0.3.9). The hosted Garden service and website are gone; nothing is for sale | 10,000 free pages once per account (not monthly), no card required; open-source library is Apache-2.0 and free to self-host | Free account: public models/datasets, 100GB private storage, 5 min/day ZeroGPU, $0.10/mo Inference Providers credits, free CPU Basic Spaces | Free: up to 5 model seats, 5 GB/mo storage, 1 GB/mo Weave ingestion |
| Paid from | — | $0.015 per page after the first 10,000 free pages (Pay-As-You-Go) | PRO $9/mo; Team $20/user/mo; Enterprise from $50/user/mo | Pro from $60/mo (teams <50); usage billed for storage/Weave/inference |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | ~13M monthly active users; 50,000+ organizations | 1,400+ organizations (incl. AstraZeneca, NVIDIA) |
| Founded | 2023 | 2022 | 2016 | 2017 |
| Maker | Databricks (acquired 2024) | Independent (Unstructured Technologies, Inc.) | Independent (Hugging Face, Inc.; NVIDIA acquisition pending) | CoreWeave |
| Verdict | Lilac made large text datasets explorable: it clustered and auto-titled documents, ran semantic and keyword search, and flagged PII and near-duplicates through a local UI and Python API. Databricks acquired it in March 2... |
Unstructured remains a sensible default for turning varied documents into AI-ready data, with a permissive open-source core and simple per-page hosted pricing that has become cheaper. Its accuracy rankings come from its... |
Hugging Face remains indispensable for anyone working with open AI models: the default place to find, share and test models and datasets, with simple paid plans and pay-as-you-go inference with no markup on partner provi... |
W&B is close to default infrastructure for ML teams — its experiment-tracking SDK is the sticky part, logging runs, metrics and artifacts with a few lines of code — and as of 30 September 2026 it lives inside CoreWea... |
| Full review → | Directory listing → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.