Data Collection / Harvesting Services

Author
Researched by Gulbahar Karatas
|
Last update: December 27, 2024

Data collection companies gather data for businesses according to their needs. +Show More

Data collection companies gather data for businesses according to their needs. Depending on the nature of the requested data, data collection service providers use different techniques to create required datasets. For instance, they can employ data engineers and leverage web scraping if the required data can be found online, or crowdsource dataset creation with independent workers.

If you’d like to learn about the ecosystem consisting of Data Collection / Harvesting Services and others, feel free to check AIMultiple AI Services.
How relevant, verifiable metrics drive AIMultiple’s rankings

AIMultiple uses relevant & verifiable metrics to evaluate vendors.

Metrics are selected based on typical enterprise procurement processes ensuring that market leaders, fast-growing challengers, feature-complete solutions and cost-effective solutions are ranked highly so they can be shortlisted.
Data regarding these metrics are collected from public sources as outlined in the “What are AIMultiple’s data sources?” section of this page.


There are 2 ways in which vendor metrics are processed to help prioritization:
1- Vendors are grouped within 4 metrics (customer satisfaction, market presence, growth and features) according to their performance in that metric.
2- Vendors that perform high in these metrics are ranked higher in the list.


The data used in each vendor’s ranking can be accessed by expanding the vendor’s row in the below list.
This page includes links to AIMultiple’s sponsors. Sponsored links are included in “Visit Website” buttons and ranked at the top of the list when results are sorted by “Sponsored”. Sponsors have no say over the ranking which is based on market data. Organic ranking can be seen by sorting by “AIMultiple” or other sorting approaches. For more on how AIMultiple works, please see the ethical standards that we follow and how we fund our research.

Products Position Data Collection Focus ISO 27001 Certification
Clickworker logo

Clickworker

Leader
Over 4.5 million Clickworkers can collect data, annotate data, analyze sentiments, participate in surveys and offer SEO content writing services. Data collection: Your algorithms need human interaction if you want them to provide human-like results. We are ready to help you get more out of your algorithms by generating, labeling and validating unique AI datasets, specifically tailored to your needs as well as provide you with a solution for analyzing your AI’s output results in no time. SEO content services: Our international pool of qualified Clickworkers develops search optimized texts (unique content for SEO) in a variety of languages to help your key customers find you online and to ensure you rank high above the competition. Sentiment analysis: It is not an easy task trying to figure out the emotions your customers feel when getting in contact with your brand, products or services. Our sentiment analysis service helps you to better understand customers’ sentiments related to your business. Together with our large crowd of Clickworkers, we analyze your material for you. No matter if you want us to go through texts, videos, or audio files, all files are carefully examined, evaluated and categorized according to the criteria specified by you. Data annotation: Take advantage of our audio, image, text and video annotation services to promptly obtain large quantities of high-quality training data for use with your computer vision, NLP and speech models. Our Clickworkers ensure highly individualized implementation of your annotation projects.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Average rating
4.10 / 5 based on ~20 reviews
Market presence
Company's number of employees
1k-2k employees
Company's social media followers
10k-20k followers
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Appen logo

Appen

Leader
-
Appen combines the best of human and machine intelligence to provide high-quality annotated training data
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Average rating
4.43 / 5 based on ~60 reviews
Market presence
Number of case studies
20-30 case studies
Company's number of employees
10k-20k employees
Company's social media followers
1m-2m followers
Features
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
public
Founding year
2011
Amazon Mechanical Turk logo

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Leader
-
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) serves as a crowdsourcing hub, enabling individuals and businesses to delegate tasks to a worldwide virtual workforce, facilitating data collection, annotation, and various services through its network of ~500,000 workers.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Average rating
4.10 / 5 based on ~30 reviews
Market presence
Company's number of employees
100k-1m employees
Company's social media followers
10m-20m followers
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
1996
TELUS International logo

TELUS International

Leader
Playment offers a fully-managed data labeling solution to build highly accurate training datasets for computer vision models
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Average rating
4.70 / 5 based on ~10 reviews
Market presence
Number of case studies
5-10 case studies
Company's number of employees
3k-4k employees
Company's social media followers
100k-1m followers
Total funding
$1-5m
# of funding rounds
4
Latest funding date
November 21, 2017
Last funding amount
$1-5m
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
2015
Prolific logo

Prolific

Leader
Get high-quality human data to make your AI models more effective. Instantly connect with 200k+ participants and domain specialists.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
300-400 employees
Company's social media followers
5k-10k followers
Total funding
$10-50m
# of funding rounds
2
Latest funding date
July 12, 2023
Last funding amount
$10-50m
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
2014
TaskUS logo

TaskUS

Challenger
TaskUS offers AI services, including training data collection, data annotation, and model evaluation through a crowdsourcing model.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
20k-30k employees
Company's social media followers
100k-1m followers
Total funding
$250-500m
# of funding rounds
3
Latest funding date
August 9, 2018
Last funding amount
$250-500m
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
public
Founding year
2008
Toloka logo

Toloka

Challenger
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
1k-2k employees
Company's social media followers
50k-100k followers
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
2014
Innodata logo

Innodata

Challenger
Innodata offers AI data collection and generation services through a crowdsourcing model along with other data engineering services.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
4k-5k employees
Company's social media followers
40k-50k followers
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
public
Founding year
1988
DataForce by TransPerfect logo

DataForce by TransPerfect

Challenger
The DataForce Platform is a proprietary solution developed in-house by TransPerfect for various types of data-oriented projects like AI training data generation, data collection, etc.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
10k-20k employees
Company's social media followers
1m-2m followers
Total funding
$250-500m
# of funding rounds
1
Latest funding date
June 20, 2019
Last funding amount
$250-500m
Features
Data Collection Focus
Data Annotation
Mobile Application
API Availability
ISO 27001 Certification
Code of Conduct
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
1992
shaip logo

shaip

Challenger
-
-
Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, Shaip offers a human-in-the-loop data platform and services to support all aspects of managing training data for the development of AI/ML models. From data collection, licensing, curation, labeling, transcribing to the seamless scalability of our people, platform, and processes, Shaip contributes to a diverse set of verticals to solve the most demanding AI challenges. Leverage next-gen cognitive data labeling services to acquire readily available quality data to train AI/ML algorithms, developed by our pool of AI data annotation experts, and accelerate deep learning.
Basis for Evaluation

We made these evaluations based on the following parameters;

Customer satisfaction
Market presence
Company's number of employees
300-400 employees
Company's social media followers
10k-20k followers
Company
Type of company
private
Founding year
2018

“-”: AIMultiple team has not yet verified that vendor provides the specified feature. AIMultiple team focuses on feature verification for top 10 vendors.


Sources

AIMultiple uses these data sources for ranking solutions and awarding badges in data collection services:


10 vendor web domains
9 funding announcements
29 social media profiles
12 profiles on review platforms
21 search engine queries

Data Collection Leaders

According to the weighted combination of 4 metrics

Appen logo
Amazon Mechanical Turk logo
Clickworker logo
TELUS International logo
Prolific logo

What are data collection
customer satisfaction leaders?

Taking into account the latest metrics outlined below, these are the current data collection customer satisfaction leaders:

Appen logo
Amazon Mechanical Turk logo
Clickworker logo
TELUS International logo
Prolific logo

Which data collection solution provides the most customer satisfaction?

AIMultiple uses product and service reviews from multiple review platforms in determining customer satisfaction.

While deciding a product's level of customer satisfaction, AIMultiple takes into account its number of reviews, how reviewers rate it and the recency of reviews.

  • Number of reviews is important because it is easier to get a small number of high ratings than a high number of them.
  • Recency is important as products are always evolving.
  • Reviews older than 5 years are not taken into consideration
  • older than 12 months have reduced impact in average ratings in line with their date of publishing.

What are data collection
market leaders?

Taking into account the latest metrics outlined below, these are the current data collection market leaders:

Appen logo
Amazon Mechanical Turk logo
Clickworker logo
TELUS International logo
Prolific logo

Which one has collected the most reviews?

AIMultiple uses multiple datapoints in identifying market leaders:

  • Product line revenue (when available)
  • Number of reviews
  • Number of case studies
  • Number and experience of employees
  • Social media presence and engagement
Out of these, number of reviews information is available for all products and is summarized in the graph:

Appen
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Clickworker
TELUS International
Mindy Support

What are data collection feature leaders?

Taking into account the latest metrics outlined below, these are the current rpa software feature leaders.

Clickworker logo
LXT logo
Summa Linguae Technologies logo
TELUS International logo
Toloka logo

Which one offers the most features?

Clickworker, LXT, Summa Linguae Technologies offer the most feature complete products.

See how features are counted.

Clickworker
6 features
LXT
6 features
Summa Linguae Technologies
6 features
TELUS International
6 features
Toloka
6 features

What are the most mature data collection services?

Which one has the most employees?

AWS logo
 logo
Appen logo
TransPerfect logo
Innodata logo

Which data collection companies have the most employees?

1,186 employees work for a typical company in this solution category which is 1,163 more than the number of employees for a typical company in the average solution category.

In most cases, companies need at least 10 employees to serve other businesses with a proven tech product or service. 13 companies with >10 employees are offering data collection services. Top 3 products are developed by companies with a total of 100k employees. The largest company in this domain is AWS with more than 100,000 employees. AWS provides the data collection solution: Amazon Mechanical Turk

AWS
Appen
TransPerfect
Innodata

Insights

What are the most common words describing data collection services?

This data is collected from customer reviews for all data collection companies. The most positive word describing data collection services is “Easy to use” that is used in 3% of the reviews. The most negative one is “Difficult” with which is used in 4% of all the data collection reviews.

What is the average customer size?

According to customer reviews, most common company size for data collection customers is 1-50 Employees. Customers with 1-50 Employees make up 69% of data collection customers. For an average AI Services solution, customers with 1-50 Employees make up 27% of total customers.

Customer Evaluation

These scores are the average scores collected from customer reviews for all data collection services. Data Collection Services are most positively evaluated in terms of "Overall" but falls behind in "Customer Service".

Overall
Customer Service
Ease of Use
Likelihood to Recommend
Value For Money

Where are data collection vendors' HQs located?

What is the level of interest in data collection services?

This category was searched on average for 430 times per month on search engines in 2024. This number has decreased to 0 in 2025. If we compare with other ai services solutions, a typical solution was searched 12.9k times in 2024 and this decreased to 0 in 2025.

Learn more about Data Collection Services

Data collection is the process of gathering secondary or newly generated data to use in projects such as AI development, market research, educational research, etc.

Data collection companies offer different types of data, either by generating it or gathering it from various sources. Their offerings include AI training datasets, market research datasets, academic research datasets, survey data, etc.

With the volume of data required and managed for AI projects, It can be resources-heavy to perform such tasks in-house. Working with a data collection service provider can help business leaders fulfill their data needs more efficiently. 

A data collection service can offer:

  • A faster service
  • Human-generated data (image, video, audio, text. etc)
  • More diverse and multilingual datasets
  • Scalable services
  • A cheaper option than in-house data collection.

Data collection services usually have a vast network of contributors that generate data on demand for different use cases. Some companies also offer pre-packaged datasets which have been gathered in the past.

Data crowdsourcing can benefit your business by enabling access to a large network of talent that gathers or generates fresh data on demand. Crowdsourcing platforms can provide diverse datasets that are cheaper and faster to obtain.