5 alternatives to Surge AI

Launched in 2020, Surge AI is a data labeling company based in San Francisco. The firm has what it calls an “elite” data labeling workforce - people who are paid to tag data for training AI models. Customers pay Surge AI for labelers who can tag, rate, or comment on a wide range of media. 

Despite being a relatively young company, Surge AI has an impressive list of clients, including some of the world’s leading AI companies and several prominent universities. 

But it’s not the only company offering data labeling services to AI researchers. If you’re building or testing an AI model, it’s valuable to know about Surge AI competitors and alternatives that can offer different kinds of services and approaches. 

In this article, you will learn about:

• What Surge AI is and how it works.
• The strengths and weaknesses of Surge AI.
• An overview of five alternatives to Surge AI.

Introducing Surge AI

For many years, AI researchers have depended on human labelers to help train AI models. Labelers perform various tasks, including tagging images, rating or ranking information, identifying emotion in text, and many others. 

Finding reliable, quality labelers has long been a challenge. And this is where companies like Surge AI come in. 

Surge AI describes its labelers as “elite”—the workforce is educated, and only native speakers are used on language tasks (e.g., only Spanish speakers label Spanish text). Rather than outsourcing recruitment to other companies, applicants to the platform are vetted and work directly with Surge AI. 

Another feature of Surge AI is its personalization engine. If you have a project that requires people with specific skills or experience (e.g., accounting education, Facebook users, video gamers, etc.), you can specify this, and the company will find labelers with relevant know-how. 

Pros and cons of using Surge AI

While Surge AI has many advantages, it’s also important to be aware of its limitations. 

Strengths of Surge AI

• Global: The firm’s workforce is global and speaks over 30 languages. 
• Support: Surge AI’s customer service team helps researchers write labeling guidelines, creates crews of labelers (‘Surgers’), and offers 24/7 support. 
• Quality: The company recruits skilled, educated workers to its platform. 
• Targeting: Surge AI lets you specify the desired skills or backgrounds of labelers for your project. 

Weaknesses of Surge AI

• Lack of transparency: The company does not publicly advertise the number of labelers on its platform, where they’re from, or who they are. But in one 2023 interview, the company’s founder said it had over 100,000 labelers on the platform. 
• Rates and fairness: Surge AI doesn’t publish how much it pays labelers for their work. 
• Focus on basic labeling: Surge AI’s labelers primarily work on lower-value projects with limited complexity.
• Large commitments: Surge AI often requires customers to commit to large upfront orders. 
• Speed: The speed at which Surge AI returns data can be varied, with some customers waiting longer than expected. 

Fairness: Watch our on-demand webinar about ethical AI gig work

What are the best alternatives to Surge AI?

Several companies can help AI researchers find people to label, annotate, and tag data to train their models. Here are five Surge AI alternatives offering a similar service but with key differences. 

1. Prolific

With over 200,000 vetted taskers, Prolific helps AI researchers gather rich, high-quality data from a diverse and fairly treated workforce. Launched in 2014, the firm’s taskers are known for their comprehensive free-text responses. Its AI labeling client list includes Google, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford. 

Similar to Surge AI, Prolific has curated its own labeling workforce (but unlike Surge AI, you can quickly find out about Prolific’s fees and its labeler demographics). To become a tasker on Prolific, individuals must undergo an extensive verification process, with over 35 checks and bank-grade ID verification. This significantly reduces the risk of bots on the platform. 

Prolific has several unique features that make it an attractive Surge AI alternative:

• Scale: Prolific’s workforce of 200,000+ taskers is double the size of Surge AI’s reported pool. 
• Engagement: Prolific taskers are paid a minimum of $8 per hour - wherever they live on the planet. They have a strong understanding of AI training and are genuinely enthusiastic about AI training tasks (it’s some of the most popular work on our platform). 
• Diverse: Prolific helps AI researchers overcome one of the key challenges with AI training data: its tendency towards bias. Prolific has over 300 filters to narrow down your labeling workforce, so you can train your model using people with genuinely diverse backgrounds and perspectives. 
• Quality: Our labelers are renowned in the AI training industry for their comprehensive free-text responses. You can expect high-quality, thoughtful answers and engagement with your tasks. And we make it possible for you to easily find your taskers again for further testing. 
• Niche recruitment: With 300 filters, plus the ability to add your own screener questions, Prolific allows you to find very specific kinds of people to test AI models. 
• Custom web apps and external tools: Prolific can build custom web apps for testing AI models, and also connects with popular labeling tools. 
• API: Prolific's API seamlessly integrates with your tools, allowing you to launch tasks quickly and get results even faster.

When is Prolific the best alternative to Surge AI?

Choose Prolific for high-quality responses from real, vetted candidates. Equally, if your organization prioritizes fair payment for workers and transparency, Prolific is a strong option.

Case study: How a Carnegie Mellon researcher used Prolific to find niche taskers 

2. Appen

With over 25 years of experience providing high-quality datasets, Australian firm Appen is one of the longest-established companies in the labeling industry. The company says it has over 1 million AI training workers worldwide, speaking over 500 languages and in 200 countries. Appen says its customers include over 80% of leading LLM builders. 

Appen provides a number of AI training tools, including:

• Supervised fine-tuning
• Human preference ranking
• LLM evaluation
• A/B testing
• LLM red teaming
• Retrieval augmented generation

In addition to desk-based data annotation, Appen’s crowd can also support various other kinds of data generation. These include things like remote data collection (visiting places and taking photos, for instance), onsite collection (workers use equipment or carry out tasks at Appen’s own global facilities), and more. 

Appen has a number of features that make it an appealing Surge AI alternative:

• Scale: Appen has over 1 million people in its workforce, giving you access to a larger pool than Surge AI. That allows you to gather perspectives from a wider range of people. 
• More forms of data creation: Appen allows AI model testers to gather data in different ways, including through various in-person/non-desk-based tasks. 
• Experience: With over 25 years in business, and many of the world’s leading AI companies as clients, the firm is reliable and trusted by industry. 

When is Appen the best alternative to Surge AI?

Choose Appen when you need scale and a genuinely global crowd workforce to label or annotate data. 

3. Clickworker

Headquartered in the USA and Germany, Clickworker is a well-established (15+ years) micro task website. It gives AI companies and researchers access to over 6 million workers in 136 countries. This crowd of workers provides Clickworker with details about their skills and experience, meaning researchers can filter down and find suitable people. The company can also source additional workers through third-party suppliers. 

While Clickworker does not advertise its fees or pay levels, it does specify that workers are never paid below the minimum wage in their country. The firm also says it is committed to fair and ethical treatment of its people. 

Note that Clickworker specializes in computer vision and conversational AI only. Clickworkers can tag or annotate text and images, analyze text, or verify AI output - but may not be able to support other kinds of projects. 

Clickworker is an attractive Surge AI competitor for a few key reasons:

• Large workforce: With 6 million people in its crowd, Clickworker has one of the largest remote workforces available. This may make it faster to get the data you need. 
• Specialization: The company’s focus on computer vision and conversational AI means its taskers are experienced in annotating these kinds of data. 
• Support: Clickworker assigns a project manager to help you set up your dataset creation project. 

When is Clickworker the best alternative to Surge AI?

Choose Clickworker to access a large, global workforce that can carry out simpler annotation tasks quickly. 

4. Upwork

Upwork is a platform that allows you to find freelancers and remote workers. When you have a job that needs completing, you post it on the platform, and people with relevant experience can apply. It is then down to you to look through applications, choose workers and agree rates. 

This is clearly a very different approach from the other platforms discussed so far. Since you will need to find and manage AI annotators and labelers yourself, the process is much more time-consuming than with crowdsourcing platforms like Surge AI. Evidently, it’s not so suitable for labeling projects with millions of images or large volumes of text. 

But Upwork does have certain advantages over Surge AI:

• Complex tasks: Upwork is a good option if you have very complex or unusual tasks that potentially require unique expertise, skills, or experience. Upwork members tend to be educated and have professional experience, meaning they can help with more sophisticated AI training activities. 
• Direct relationship: Upwork enables direct contact with the worker. This ensures improved communication, feedback, and instruction. 
• Fair pay: On Upwork, freelancers advertise their own rates and can negotiate pay directly with you (although Upwork takes a 10% freelancer service fee). 

When is Upwork the best alternative to Surge AI?

Choose Upwork when you want to work directly with labelers on your projects. Upwork is generally best suited to smaller, complex studies or tests—it’s not suitable for labeling massive datasets to train models on. 

5. Encord

Encord is a software company that has created AI testing tools which researchers and AI companies can use themselves. Whether you want people to annotate images, test models, or label text, Encord gives you ‘plug and play’ tools to do just that. Once you’ve chosen the kind of labeling solution you want, you then invite people to do the labeling work. 

Encord has a number of advantages over Surge AI:

• Control: Since you own and deploy the tools, you have complete control of projects. You can design workflows, manage your own labeling team, train people to use the tools, and more. 
• Specialized use cases: Encord’s tools can be tailored to specific use cases - which can make them more appealing when compared to generic platforms like Surge AI. 

When is Encord the best alternative to Surge AI?

Choose Encord when you want to roll out your own AI testing tool. 

The best alternatives to Surge AI

When you’re training an AI model, access to reliable, high-quality datasets is invaluable. While Surge AI can certainly help provide some kinds of data, every project is different - and it’s valuable to know about Surge AI alternatives with different specialisms or features. 

At Prolific, we have vetted over 200,000 taskers from around the world who can support your AI labeling projects. They’re skilled, experienced, fairly paid, and diverse - meaning you can build AI models on datasets you can trust. 

If you need a Surge AI alternative, learn more about Prolific’s AI solutions, or contact us about training your AI model today.