SAM alternatives in 2026: 24 tools like SAM

Closest: Computer Vision

Amazon Rekognition

AWS service for image and video analysis: faces, objects, text and moderation

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Azure AI Vision

Microsoft Azure API for image analysis, OCR and spatial analysis

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Detectron2

Meta's object detection and segmentation framework

CuratedLinuxMac

0 use thisCompare with SAM
DETR

End-to-end object detection with transformers by Meta (archived research code)

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Google Vision AI

Google Cloud's image recognition and OCR API

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
PaddleOCR

Baidu's multilingual OCR and document parsing toolkit with PaddleOCR-VL

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Reka Vision

Video search, analysis and clipping on Reka's multimodal models

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Roboflow

Platform to label data, train and deploy computer vision models

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Tesseract

Open-source OCR engine recognizing 100+ languages out of the box

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
YOLO

Real-time object detection by Ultralytics

CuratedAndroidiOSLinuxMacWebWindows

0 use thisCompare with SAM

More in Multimodal & Perception

Flamingo

DeepMind's 2022 few-shot visual language model; weights not released

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Glimpse

Visual reasoning model for images and video, in research preview

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
InternVL

Shanghai AI Lab's open multimodal model family, up to 241B MoE

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
LFM2.5-VL

Small vision-language models for on-device use

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
LLaVA

Open visual instruction tuning VLM family, incl. LLaVA-NeXT and OneVision

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
moondream

Open vision-language models by M87 Labs, with fine-tuning and a cloud API

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Qwen-VL

Alibaba's visual language model with strong document understanding

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Reka

Reka's multimodal model family (Flash, Edge) for text, image, and video

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
ZAYA1-VL

Small open vision-language model built on ZAYA1-8B

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
AssemblyAI

Speech AI models for transcription and understanding

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Azure Speech

Microsoft Azure's speech-to-text and translation service

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Deepgram

AI-powered speech recognition API

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Ink

Streaming speech-to-text model built for voice agents

CuratedWeb

0 use thisCompare with SAM
Kyutai STT

Streaming speech-to-text models for real-time transcription

Curated

0 use thisCompare with SAM

Questions

What are the closest alternatives to SAM?

Amazon Rekognition, Azure AI Vision and Detectron2 sit on the same sub-line as SAM (Computer Vision) on AI Landscape, with 7 more.

How are these alternatives chosen?

They are the other products on the Multimodal & Perception stop of the map: curated products first, the ones on SAM's sub-line before the rest, then by name until members have marked enough of them.