Encord vs Toloka

Merlin is Encord's agentic intelligence layer, letting teams build, observe and optimise their data infrastructure through conversation. It creates complete labeling setups from prompts or documents, reports data metrics and coverage gaps on demand, and surfaces issues affecting model performance. It is reachable inside Encord or from external tools over Model Context Protocol, including Claude and Slack.

The multimodal data layer for physical AI: one platform for managing, curating, annotating and aligning sensor, video, image and text data at petabyte scale. The modules a buyer licenses — Annotate, Index and Active — are recorded separately.

Encord Active is Encord's model and data evaluation product. It evaluates and validates models against their data to surface, curate and prioritise the most valuable data for training and fine-tuning, covering model robustness checks, drift and failure-mode detection, automated label-error detection, and active learning workflows across images, video, 3D/LiDAR, audio and documents.

Encord Annotate is Encord's multimodal data labeling product, used to annotate and review images, video, audio, text, documents, DICOM, LiDAR and geospatial data. It provides AI-assisted labeling, customizable ontologies, human-in-the-loop review workflows and quality-control tooling for managing large annotation teams.

Managed annotation service: Encord supplies vetted domain experts for a customer's task and runs the projects, with an evaluation workflow built around the customer's own spec rather than volume alone.

Managed collection of real-world training data for physical AI: in-field operators, teleoperation facilities and configurable lab environments gathering the embodied, egocentric and sensor data a robotics model needs.

Encord Index is Encord's multimodal data curation and management product. It lets teams search datasets with natural language and similarity search across video, image, audio, LiDAR, text, document, geospatial and HTML files, filter by 40+ data metrics and custom metadata, visualise outliers on embeddings plots, and remove duplicates and poor-quality data via Collections. Data stays in the customer's own cloud with 'zero data migration required'.

End-to-end data service for robotics, autonomous systems and embodied AI: data collection (in-field operators, teleoperation), curation, LiDAR/point-cloud/multi-camera annotation, VLA/VLM action-captioning, and post-deployment feedback loops, with on-prem/VPC deployment.

A hybrid AI-plus-human agent that takes a delegated task - research, data analysis, copywriting, design or development - has AI do the first pass, then routes it to one of 10,000+ vetted experts for verification and multi-layer QA, returning results in 2-24 hours.

An independent evaluation platform that ranks frontier LLMs on agentic tool-use tasks using private, non-contaminated benchmarks across industry domains, scored on a pass^5 reliability metric, with the underlying RL Gyms and evaluation datasets available to license.

A self-serve service that lowers per-request inference cost through two tools - fine-tuning LoRA adapters on frozen Qwen3 base models to replace a frontier API on a narrow task, and prompt gisting that compresses long instruction prefixes into learned tokens.

Toloka's catalogue of ready-made training datasets sold outright — three named at the time of writing (Tau-bench Dataset Extension, University-level Math Reasoning, Multimodal Conversations) — as distinct from the custom data work its Platform sells.

Human-in-the-loop data programs -- demonstrations, annotation and evaluation -- for training robotics and physical AI systems.

A self-serve platform where an AI agent turns a described data goal into a full human-annotation pipeline - RLHF and preference data, data collection, instruction tuning, model evaluation, synthetic-data validation and content-moderation QA - with LLM-based quality checks on the output.