With these evaluation criteria in mind, let’s explore the top training dataset companies, their key features and suitable AI use cases.
Best data providers for training AI
We categorized the training data providers based on which AI model development needs they are most equipped to meet.
Domain-specific web data providers
These web data companies provide precise datasets tailored to a particular field or industry, such as finance, social media or travel, for teams training niche AI models.
- Bright Data
Bright Data’s AI data packages home page
Bright Data offers current, historical and custom ML-ready datasets across text, numeric, image and video modalities. AI organizations and development teams can access specialized datasets through various means, including:
- Custom data solutions (Managed Services): AI teams can work with Bright Data to define the data schema, web sources, format and frequency that fit their model’s needs. Then, Bright Data curates, validates and structures the dataset, with customizable delivery and integration options. To track the data collection progress, Bright Data provides a dedicated dashboard with real-time status updates.
- Dataset Marketplace: Bright Data also offers ready-made datasets sourced from 120+ domains, including social media, real estate and e-commerce platforms, on a subscription or one-off basis. Teams can filter results by timeframe or region and customize the dataset’s fields to their use case using the Filter API. Bright Data also supports AI-powered dataset enrichment for teams that want additional attributes.
- Web Archive: Bright Data maintains a web data repository containing over 100 billion web pages and metadata, 365 billion image and video URLs, 70 trillion text tokens in 100+ languages and historical search engine results pages (SERPs). You can filter dataset snapshots by time range, date, language, category and more using the Archive API. To keep the Archive relevant for model development, it is refreshed daily with over 2.5 petabytes of web data.
- Web Scraper API: Teams that need real-time, vertical-specific data can use the Web Scraper API with 120+ predefined endpoints to pull web data from major platforms, including Amazon, LinkedIn and Zillow. You provide target URLs for a particular domain, customize the output fields and use the dedicated endpoint to programmatically access and retrieve precise datasets.
Key features of Bright Data include:
- Delivers structured datasets in CSV, JSON, JSONL, NDJSON and Parquet formats
- Supports data ingestion via API, webhooks or to Amazon S3 buckets, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Alibaba Cloud OSS, PubSub and SFTP
- Offers sample dataset downloads in the Dataset Marketplace to inform your buying decision
- Provides metadata for context and optional annotation services
- Supports both batch processing and real-time streaming when using the Web Scraper API
- Allows scheduled dataset refreshes with change tracking to keep AI models up-to-date
- Implements schema validation, dataset statistics and continuous monitoring as part of its quality assurance process
Bright Data offers an end-to-end data solution for AI organizations that need real-time and high-volume public data to train vertical models or multimodal AI systems.
- Zyte
Zyte Data home page
Zyte’s data extraction service gives teams control over the dataset acquisition logic, including categories to extract, sites to prioritize, data points to source and specific delivery format. The platform handles dataset deduplication, matching and validation.
Key features of Zyte include:
- Covers several data categories, including social media, real estate, product reviews and forums
- Provides a Data Catalog of sample datasets sourced from e-commerce and news websites, which teams can evaluate before requesting or customizing the records
- Exports datasets in JSON, CSV or XML formats
- Delivers datasets to specified cloud platform with support for AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
- Offers daily, weekly, monthly and customized delivery schedules, according to your project’s needs
Zyte can support AI and business teams training recommendation systems or sentiment analysis models with domain-specific datasets.
- Coresignal
For companies seeking industry-specific datasets to train business AI models, Coresignal provides a database containing over three billion records of publicly available textual data on companies, employees and job postings. The platform offers both historical and real-time datasets, while handling data deduplication, standardization and AI-driven enrichment. Teams can use Coresignal’s AI-powered query builder to filter through its database and export tailored datasets using natural language prompts.
Key features of Coresignal include:
- Provides single-source or multi-source datasets from 15 websites, including Indeed, Glassdoor and Owler
- Offers ready-to-use structured data in CSV, JSON, JSONL and Parquet formats
- Supports data delivery via API, direct download or to cloud storage
- Uses Dagster and Great Expectations for automated data quality checks
- Enables real-time, daily, weekly or monthly dataset updates
Startups and businesses training predictive analytics or workforce intelligence models can use Coresignal to access structured B2B datasets.
Open web data providers
These platforms maintain freely accessible datasets with minimal use, modification and redistribution limitations, depending on their license terms. They are ideal for AI researchers, ML engineers or startups on a budget.
- Hugging Face
Hugging Face Dataset Hub
Hugging Face has a Dataset Hub that hosts over 500,000 public datasets uploaded by different contributors for developing and benchmarking computer vision, NLP and multimodal AI systems. Many datasets in the Hub are web-sourced, while others are synthetically generated or privately collected by academic institutions and government agencies. These datasets may include text, audio, image, video, geospatial, time-series, 3D or tabular data.
Hugging Face hosts each dataset as a Git repository, allowing developers to clone them locally while managing all data files and metadata through Git’s version control system.
Key features of Hugging Face Datasets Hub include:
- Hosts about 11 petabytes of training data in 8,000+ languages
- Supports multiple file formats, including Parquet (default), JSON, CSV, JSONL, SQL, text and WebDataset (.tar)
- Enables download and filtering through Hugging Face’s datasets library and its predefined functions
- Allows datasets querying via the dataset viewer REST API, which gives access to the metadata, statistics and size for all datasets in the Hub
- Tracks dataset changes using Git commits or tags
- Memory-mapped datasets using Apache Arrow to minimize RAM usage
- Supports streaming so developers can iterate over large-scale datasets without downloading them locally, saving disk space and mitigating memory overflow risks
You can concatenate datasets of the same column types, filter rows or shard the datasets into batches via the datasets library. Using Hugging Face community-driven datasets, ML engineers can build visual question-answering applications, train speech recognition software and perform time-series forecasting.
- Common Crawl
Common Crawl home page
Common Crawl’s repository contains over nine petabytes of multilingual textual web data gathered over an 18-year period. The raw crawled data is stored in WARC files, its metadata in WAT files and its extracted plaintext in WET files, all hosted in an AWS S3 bucket (s3://commoncrawl). Because the datasets reside on AWS infrastructure, you can analyze them directly with AWS cloud tools.
Common Crawl’s datasets are generic, so developers will need to curate and adapt them to suit their specific model use case.
Key features of Common Crawl include:
- Crawled over 300 billion web pages since 2007
- Accessible through AWS CLI or direct HTTP(S) download via the https://data.commoncrawl.org/[full_file_path] URL scheme
- Provides a Common Crawl Index Server API for searching through the repository for specific web pages
- Offers columnar URL index files for data filtering and parallel downloads via Amazon Athena, Apache Spark or Hadoop
- Supports Elastic MapReduce (EMR) processing on Amazon EC2 for running large datasets without having to set up your own clusters
- Updates its database monthly with three to five billion new web pages
Common Crawl’s corpus mostly contains raw HTML, which may include irrelevant text and repetitive sequences. You will need to further process the datasets and manually handle deduplications. For AI researchers and developers who need historical datasets to pre-train or benchmark LLMs, Common Crawl provides a longitudinal snapshot of the web.
- Large-scale AI open network (LAION)
LAION home page
LAION provides billion-scale web data extracted from Common Crawl’s WAT files and filtered using OpenAI’s Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. These multimodal AI training datasets were deduplicated using a URL+caption method, but they may still need additional cleaning before usage.
The two main LAION datasets are:
- Re-LAION-5B: Contains 5.5 billion updated image-text pairs based on Common Crawl datasets up to September 2022. The dataset features 2.3 billion pairs in English, 2.2 billion from 100+ languages and one billion with unassignable strings. Re-LAION-5B also includes the CLIP ViT-L/14 embeddings of each pair, watermark detection scores and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) indices for filtering.
- LAION-400M: Includes 400 million uncurated image-text pairs in English, sourced from Common Crawl’s datasets crawled between 2014 and 2021. Developers can create subsets based on image height or width using the kNN index.
Key features of LAION include:
- Provides image URLs and multilingual text data, suitable for vision-language learning
- Stores metadata files containing the URLs and text descriptions in Parquet format, so researchers can download the images directly from their original sources using tools like img2dataset
LAION datasets are designed for AI researchers training and evaluating personal generative AI projects, not for production deployment.
These platforms simplify the process of sourcing and collecting large volumes of web data to train LLMs, neural networks or forecasting systems.
Comparison of web data providers for machine learning models
The following table compares each web data provider across quantity, quality, modality and update frequency.
| Features/capabilities | Bright Data | Zyte | Coresignal | HuggingFace | Common Crawl | LAION |
| Scale | Petabyte-scale Web Archive; Dataset Marketplace with 200+ pre-collected datasets | Based on the buyer’s requirements; Data Catalog contains datasets from about 100,000 e-commerce and news websites | Over 3 billion records of business and professional network data | About 11 petabytes of datasets in 8,000+ languages; 500,000 datasets with majority web-sourced | Over 9 petabytes of web data | Over 5.5 billion web data |
| Data types | Text, image, video | Text | Text | Text, audio, image, video, geospatial, time-series, 3D, tabular data | Text | Text, image |
| Supported formats | JSON, CSV, JSONL, NDJSON, Parquet | JSON, CSV, XML | CSV, JSON, JSONL, Parquet | JSON, CSV, JSONL, Parquet, text, WebDataset (.tar) and more | WARC, WAT and WET files | Parquet |
| Quality assurance | Schema validation, dataset statistics and ongoing monitoring | Buyer specified benchmarks like precision and recall | Automated data quality checks through Dagster and Great Expectations | Varies depending on the contributors; might need further processing | Requires additional data cleaning and categorization efforts | May contain inconsistencies or outdated information |
| Scheduled delivery | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Data annotation | Yes, if requested by buyer | No | No | Some datasets are annotated | No | Each image is associated with descriptive text captions |
| Update frequency | Over 2.5 petabytes of new web data added daily to the Web Archive; continuously updated Dataset Marketplace and real-time data via Web Scraper API | Predefined frequency | Real-time, daily and monthly options | Updates only occur when the contributor pushes new versions or revisions | Monthly updates, with 3 to 5 billion new web pages added | These datasets aren’t regularly updated; last cutoff is September 2022 |
From the comparison, Bright Data offers an enterprise-level web data acquisition service for organizations that need curated, specialized and scalable AI training datasets. Zyte and Coresignal are suitable for businesses and e-commerce startups building B2B-focused AI applications. Hugging Face, Common Crawl and LAION are ideal for researchers, developers and budget-conscious teams working on academic or personal projects.
Final takeaway
Selecting the right web data provider starts with defining what “right data” means for your AI training project. This includes understanding your use case, scale, data format requirements, delivery mode and preferred data refresh schedule. With this information, you can choose a data provider that reflects your model development needs, while maintaining quality and quantity standards.
