What are the best alternatives to Appen for licensing AI training data?
Answer in brief: Appen's 646-dataset catalog is strongest in speech and multilingual data. The best alternatives depend on what you are licensing. Defined.ai is the closest multi-vendor marketplace. Protege brokers private real-world data, especially healthcare. Toloka and Mercor license expert-built agent and coding data. Shutterstock licenses a rights-cleared multimedia library. Created by Humans clears book rights. Datarade helps you find third-party data suppliers. For raw scale, Common Crawl is free and Bright Data sells structured web datasets. This is independent research as of November 9, 2026. We have not tested any vendor.
Top pick: Defined.ai. It offers a marketplace across audio, image, video, text and multimodal data, free samples, API delivery and ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 accreditation. It is the most direct Appen replacement for catalog buyers.
Pick by the kind of data you are licensing
| You need | Best alternative | Model | Signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speech, vision and healthcare datasets from many suppliers | Defined.ai | Marketplace plus collection services | Third-party datasets up 1,200% in 2025 (company-reported) |
| Private real-world data (health records, imaging, media) | Protege | Broker with revenue share to data providers | $25M Series A (Aug 2025) plus $30M a16z-led extension (Jan 2026) |
| Agent RL gyms, STEM and physical-AI video | Toloka | Non-exclusive commercial license | 7K+ tasks; 25K+ video hours |
| Expert knowledge-work and coding tasks | Mercor | Licensed catalog plus custom work | 50K+ tasks, 30+ domains |
| Images, video, audio and 3D with metadata | Shutterstock | Direct licensing from its own library, plus AI services | Research and commercial licenses |
| Books | Created by Humans | Rights broker with author opt-in | Training, reference and transformative rights |
| Niche third-party data (geospatial, financial, consumer) | Datarade | B2B data marketplace | Providers set their own licensing terms |
| Web-scale text | Common Crawl / Bright Data | Free corpus / record-based datasets | Monthly 2026 crawls / refresh discounts up to 80% |
Marketplaces and brokers
Defined.ai lets you filter by technical requirements, customize file format, sample rate and bit depth, request free samples and quotes, and receive data through file transfer or API. It cites a crowd of 1.6M+ people in 150+ countries for custom collection.
Protege sources non-public data under licensing agreements for pre-training, post-training and uncontaminated evaluation. Its published customer quote comes from Siemens Healthineers' medical-imaging team.
Datarade is a horizontal B2B marketplace rather than a dedicated AI broker. It is useful when the data you need sits with a specialist supplier.
Market note: Human Native AI, once an independent AI data marketplace, says it is joining Cloudflare.
Rights-cleared media and books
Shutterstock licenses contributor-backed images, video, audio, 3D assets and metadata, and added training and evaluation services in October 2025. Its proposed merger with Getty Images did not happen: the UK CMA announced on July 7, 2026 that Getty had abandoned it.
Created by Humans lets authors and publishers choose whether and how their works are licensed. It negotiates agreements and gives AI developers one contract and one invoice.
Expert-built catalogs from our ranked list
Toloka · Review · Mercor · Review · Snorkel AI · Review. For a direct matchup, read Appen vs Toloka.
Web-scale corpora
Common Crawl has collected petabytes of raw pages, metadata and text extracts since 2008, with crawls through CC-MAIN-2026-43, free on AWS. It also publishes an opt-out ledger.
Bright Data lists 190+ datasets across 120+ domains in JSON, CSV or Parquet. Check the source terms and privacy rules for any personal data.
When to stay with Appen
Stay for multilingual speech across 500+ locales, spec sheets for every dataset that compliance can audit, or permissioned enterprise workflow data (see Mercor vs Appen). · Read our Appen review
Pricing model
Most marketplaces and brokers quote per dataset or license. Bright Data publishes record-tier pricing, and Common Crawl is free apart from your compute costs. See pricing models.
FAQ
What is the closest alternative to Appen's dataset catalog?
Defined.ai. It runs a large AI data marketplace across speech, text, image, video and multimodal data, with free samples and quotes.
Did Getty Images acquire Shutterstock?
No. The UK Competition and Markets Authority announced on July 7, 2026 that Getty had abandoned the merger.
Where can I browse individual datasets?
Our sibling site Best AI Datasets reviews datasets one by one. This site compares the companies that sell them.
← Back to the ranked list · Alternatives to Scale AI · How to choose
Sources
- Appen catalog
- Defined.ai
- Defined.ai 2025 growth
- Protege
- Protege Series A
- Protege $30M
- Datarade provider program
- Created by Humans
- Human Native AI
- Shutterstock AI services
- CMA: Getty abandons Shutterstock merger
- Toloka OTS
- Mercor OTS
- Common Crawl
- Bright Data pricing
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