Hugging Face vs Modal

In short

• Both: Choice of models, API, Official SDKs, Runs models for you, Builds agents and workflows
• Only Modal states: Agent that edits files, Traces and evaluates

Hugging Face

Hugging Face hosts AI models, datasets, apps, libraries, and tools for building, sharing, and deploying machine-learning systems.

Plans

PRO Account

• $9 /month

• 10× private storage capacity
• 2× public storage capacity
• 20× included inference credits
• 8× ZeroGPU quota and highest queue priority
• Host ZeroGPU, Gradio & Docker Spaces
• Spaces Dev Mode

Team

• $20 /month per user

• SSO support (SAML & OIDC)
• Data location control with Storage Regions
• Detailed action reviews with Audit Logs
• Granular access control via Resource Groups
• Repository usage Analytics
• Advanced auth policies and repository visibility controls

Enterprise

• $50 /month per user

• + All benefits from the Team plan
• Highest storage, bandwidth, and API rate limits
• Automated user management with SCIM provisioning
• Advanced security and access controls
• Managed billing with annual commitments
• Legal and Compliance processes

Prices checked 2026-09-24 on the maker’s page.

Capabilities

• Choice of models — “Browse 2M+ models” source
• API — “Access 45,000+ models from leading AI providers through a single, unified API with no service fees.” source
• Official SDKs — “Python client to interact with the Hugging Face Hub” source
• Runs models for you — “Deploy any ML model on dedicated and autoscaling infrastructure, right from the HF Hub.” source
• Builds agents and workflows — “Smol library to build great agents in Python” source

Latest updates

• 2026-09-22 Transformers now runs llama.cpp quants

  Transformers now runs llama.cpp quants.

• 2026-09-21 tokenizers v1: encode, decode and scaling, measured (v1)

  tokenizers v1 covers encode, decode, and scaling.

• 2026-09-03 NeoMME: an efficient Multimodal-native and Multilingual Encoder

  NeoMME is a multimodal-native and multilingual encoder.

Modal

Modal is a serverless cloud platform for running AI inference, training, batch jobs, and isolated code sandboxes.

Plans

Starter

Free

• $30 / month free compute
• 3 workspace seats included
• 100 containers + 10 GPU concurrency
• Scheduled and Web Functions (limited)
• Real-time metrics and logs
• Region selection

Team

• $250 + compute / month

• $100 / month free compute
• Unlimited seats
• 5000 containers + 50 GPU concurrency
• Unlimited Scheduled Functions
• Custom domains
• Static IP proxy

Enterprise

Price on request

• Volume-based discounts
• Unlimited seats
• Higher GPU concurrency
• Embedded ML engineering services
• Environment-level budgets
• Support via private Slack

Prices checked 2026-09-25 on the maker’s page.

Capabilities

• Agent that edits files — “Autonomous agents with the right tools, context, and credentials already in place — running securely in a full, isolated dev environment.” source
• Choice of models — “Run any model or inference engine on H100s, A100s, A10Gs and more.” source
• API — “Serve your own LLM API” source
• Official SDKs — “Modal SDK” source
• Runs models for you — “Deploy and scale inference for LLMs, audio, image/video generation.” source
• Builds agents and workflows — “Designed to scale agents.” source
• Traces and evaluates — “Debug fast by zooming into metrics, logs, and live statuses of specific inference calls.” source

Latest updates

• 2026-09-17 Network egress usage broken down by app

  The Usage page now shows network egress per app.

• 2026-09-15 New controls for unauthenticated web endpoints

  Filter by authentication, audit unauthenticated deployments, and block them per environment.

• 2026-09-15 User groups for RBAC-enabled workspaces

  Assign environment roles to groups of members, created manually or synced from your identity provider via SCIM.