Best Alternatives to Merit Data in 2025
Merit Data provides robotics training datasets and custom real-world data collection for embodied AI teams, covering egocentric and multiview human manipulation, wrist-camera recordings, UMI/gripper demonstrations, teleoperation and robot-state data, and failure/recovery examples, with annotation, quality control, scoped pilots, and custom collection. Teams looking for alternatives often want different dataset coverage, pricing models, collection flexibility, or integrated tooling. The following options are strong substitutes depending on whether you need off-the-shelf robot datasets, human video data, managed collection services, or open-source pipelines.
Roboflow
Offers dataset hosting, annotation, and computer vision tooling with robotics-adjacent workflows, making it a practical alternative for teams that want to manage, label, and version their own collected data rather than buy fully custom datasets.
Scale AI
Provides managed data labeling and collection at scale, including sensor and video annotation, which suits embodied AI teams needing large annotation pipelines and quality control across multimodal robotics data.
Encord
A data annotation and curation platform with strong support for video, multimodal, and sensor data, useful for teams that want to build and QA their own manipulation and teleoperation datasets in-house.
Labelbox
Offers labeling infrastructure and managed services for multimodal data, giving robotics teams an alternative for annotation, quality control, and dataset management without outsourcing full custom collection.
AWS SageMaker Ground Truth
Provides managed labeling workflows and human-in-the-loop annotation within the AWS ecosystem, a fit for teams already on AWS that need scalable annotation for video and sensor datasets.
Open X-Embodiment / RT-X datasets
An open collection of robot manipulation datasets spanning many embodiments, offering a free alternative for teams that can work with existing public robot-state and demonstration data instead of commissioning custom collection.
DROID dataset
A large open real-world robot manipulation dataset with diverse scenes and tasks, useful as a low-cost alternative for pretraining or benchmarking when custom, project-specific collection is not yet required.
Merit Data is strongest when you need custom, scoped real-world robotics collection with annotation and QC built in. Alternatives split into three groups: annotation and data-management platforms like Roboflow, Encord, Labelbox, Scale AI, and SageMaker Ground Truth for teams handling their own collection; and open datasets like Open X-Embodiment and DROID for teams that can start from public robot manipulation data. Choose based on whether your priority is managed custom collection, in-house annotation tooling, or free pretraining data.