The top 5 Predibase alternatives for developers and businesses in 2025

Getting an open-source Large Language Model (LLM) to do cool things on your laptop is one thing. But turning it into a real, production-ready business tool that doesn’t fall over? That’s a whole different beast. It’s the gap between a fun experiment and a reliable, scalable application that can actually help customers.

That’s why we put together this practical list of the best Predibase alternatives for 2025. We’ve dug into options for everyone, from hardcore ML engineers who need raw GPU power to business teams who just want a solution that works out of the box.

What is Predibase and why consider Predibase alternatives?

So, what exactly is Predibase? Think of it as a workshop for developers building custom AI. It gives you the tools to take a foundational model, like one from the Llama or Mistral families, and train it on your company’s data using methods like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation). Once you’ve customized your model, Predibase helps you deploy it on serverless endpoints so your applications can use it.

Its core audience is data scientists and ML engineers who are comfortable building and managing models from the ground up. The catch, as some users discover, is that you’re ultimately managing a model, not a complete business solution. And its pricing, which is often based on how long your model is active (uptime), can be unpredictable and rack up costs if your usage isn’t steady.

Our criteria for choosing Predibase alternatives

Let’s be honest, the "best" tool is different for everyone. What works for a huge data science team is often overkill for a startup trying to get a product out the door. To help you figure out what’s right for you, we looked at each platform through these four lenses:

1. Ease of Use & Target Audience: How much technical skill do you need? Is it built for ML engineers who live in the terminal, general developers, or non-technical folks on a business team?

2. Primary Use Case: What’s the main job of the platform? Is it for fine-tuning models, serving pre-trained models via API, renting cheap GPUs, or giving you a finished, ready-to-use business application?

3. Pricing Model: How do they charge you? Is it per token, per hour of uptime, or a flat subscription? This is a huge deal for anyone trying to manage a budget.

4. Customization & Control: How much can you tinker with the model, the data, and the deployment setup?

Predibase alternatives at a glance

Here’s a quick rundown of the platforms we’re about to cover.

Tool	Best For	Target Audience	Pricing Model
eesel AI	Self-serve business automation	Support & IT Teams	Subscription (predictable)
Together AI	Fast & affordable model inference	Developers	Per Token
OpenPipe	High-quality, specialized fine-tuning	Developers	Per Token
Vertex AI	End-to-end MLOps on Google Cloud	Enterprises & Data Scientists	Usage-Based
RunPod	Cost-effective GPU infrastructure	ML Engineers & Hobbyists	Per Hour (GPU rental)

The top 5 Predibase alternatives in 2025

Alright, let’s get into it. Some of these tools are direct, head-to-head competitors with Predibase. Others? They’re coming at the problem from a totally different, and maybe more practical, angle for your team.

1. eesel AI

What if your goal isn’t really to build a model, but to solve a business problem, like, right now? If you’re looking to automate customer support or set up an internal knowledge base without a six-month project, eesel AI is the alternative you should be looking at. It sidesteps all the MLOps and fine-tuning headaches and just gives you a ready-to-use application.

Why we included it: It’s designed for business outcomes, not for tinkering with models. Instead of spending months trying to fine-tune a model, you can connect your existing company knowledge and have a working AI agent in a matter of minutes. It’s for the folks who need something that’s easy to get running without a dedicated DevOps team.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Go live in minutes: Seriously. You can connect your help desk (like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom) and knowledge sources (like Confluence or Google Docs) with a few clicks. You don’t need a developer or a sales call to get started.

• Built for your workflow: It comes with pre-built tools that actually do things, like an AI Agent for your help desk, an AI Copilot for drafting replies, and an internal chatbot for Slack. The whole thing is already optimized for support and IT teams.

• Test without risk: Before the AI ever talks to a real customer, you can run it on thousands of your past tickets. This shows you exactly how it would have performed and gives you a clear ROI estimate. You won’t find that on most developer platforms.

eesel AI's simulation feature allows users to test the AI's performance on past tickets to estimate ROI, a key benefit for those looking for Predibase alternatives focused on business outcomes.::

Pricing:

eesel AI has simple subscription plans that are easy to predict. You’re not charged per resolution, so your bill won’t suddenly jump just because you had a busy month.

Plan	Monthly Price	Annual Price (/mo)	Key Features
Team	$299	$239	Up to 1,000 AI interactions/mo, up to 3 bots, train on docs, AI Copilot, Slack integration.
Business	$799	$639	Up to 3,000 AI interactions/mo, unlimited bots, everything in Team, plus AI Agent, train on past tickets, AI Actions, bulk simulation.
Custom	Contact Sales	Custom	Unlimited interactions, advanced API actions, custom integrations, multi-agent orchestration.

The Verdict: If your main goal is to automate support or give your teams better tools right now, without hiring a crew of ML engineers, eesel AI is the fastest way to get there.

2. Together AI

Together AI is a heavy hitter that goes head-to-head with Predibase for its core developer audience. It’s well-known for offering some of the fastest inference speeds and most competitive prices for running a huge variety of open-source models.

Why we included it: For developers who want to build their own applications on top of LLMs, Together AI is a popular choice because of its raw speed, giant model library, and developer-friendly pricing.

Key Features & Benefits:

• A huge library of models: You get API access to hundreds of the latest open-source models, from Llama 3 to Mixtral, all through one clean interface.

• Built for speed: The whole platform is engineered for high-throughput, low-latency performance, making it a solid choice for production apps where speed matters.

• Simple fine-tuning: It provides a straightforward service for fine-tuning popular models with your own data, all handled through their API.

Pricing:

Together AI uses a pay-as-you-go model, charging you per million tokens. For many teams with spiky traffic, this is more predictable and often cheaper than Predibase’s uptime model where you pay even when the model is idle. Fine-tuning is also priced based on the tokens you process.

Service	Model Example	Price (per 1M tokens)
Inference	Llama 3.1 8B Instruct	$0.18 (input) / $0.18 (output)
Inference	Mixtral 8x7B Instruct	$0.60 (input) / $0.60 (output)
Fine-Tuning	Up to 16B model (LoRA)	$0.48

The Verdict: If you’re a developer who wants fast, affordable API access to a ton of open-source LLMs to build your own stuff, Together AI is a top-tier option.

3. OpenPipe

OpenPipe is a platform that’s all about helping teams create highly specialized, fine-tuned models that can beat much larger, general-purpose models like GPT-4 at very specific tasks. It recently got acquired by CoreWeave, a big name in cloud infrastructure.

Why we included it: It gets a lot of love in communities like Hacker News for its laser focus on making the fine-tuning process as simple and effective as possible. It’s built for teams who believe a smaller, expertly-trained model is better than a giant, generic one.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Fine-tuning made simple: The platform is designed to be as easy as possible. You upload your dataset, and it handles the rest with minimal fuss.

• A focus on reliability: They use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to help the AI learn from its experience, which helps it become more reliable and cost-effective over time.

• Deploy it anywhere: For companies with tight security requirements, OpenPipe lets you run its entire stack inside your own virtual private cloud, so your sensitive data never has to leave your network.

Pricing:

The catch? OpenPipe’s public pricing page isn’t available right now, which usually means they’re focused on larger enterprise customers who need a custom quote. This can be a roadblock for smaller teams who just want to sign up and start experimenting.

The Verdict: OpenPipe is a great pick for teams that have a very clear, specific job for a model and need top-tier performance on that one task. It’s less of a general-purpose platform and more of a precision tool.

4. Vertex AI

Vertex AI is Google’s massive, all-in-one platform for machine learning. If your company already lives and breathes in the Google Cloud ecosystem, this is the deeply integrated, enterprise-grade option.

Why we included it: For big companies that are already using Google Cloud for their data and infrastructure, Vertex AI is the natural choice. It’s incredibly powerful and comes with a comprehensive set of MLOps tools that cover the entire model lifecycle.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Plays well with Google: It connects seamlessly with BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and all the other GCP services, making life easier for teams already on the platform.

• Model Garden: You get access to Google’s own powerful models (like Gemini) plus popular open-source options like Llama 3.

• Managed infrastructure: Google takes care of all the underlying servers and hardware, so your data science team can focus on building models instead of managing server clusters.

Pricing:

Be prepared: Vertex AI has a very complex, usage-based pricing model. You pay for exactly what you use, but figuring out your monthly bill ahead of time can be a real challenge. Costs are broken down by each individual service, like model training per hour or prediction requests per 1,000 characters.

Service	Pricing Model	Example Price
Generative AI Models	Per 1,000 characters (input/output)	Starts at $0.0001
AutoML Training	Per node hour	Starts at $3.465/hr (Image)
Custom Training	Per hour (machine type)	Varies greatly
Online Prediction	Per node hour	Varies greatly

The Verdict: Vertex AI is the go-to for large organizations with existing Google Cloud commitments and dedicated data science teams who need a powerful platform to manage everything from data prep to deployment.

5. RunPod

RunPod is for teams that want total control and the absolute best price on GPU compute power. It’s an on-demand cloud GPU provider that’s often much cheaper than the big players like AWS or GCP.

Why we included it: It’s a favorite among startups, researchers, and developers on a budget who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves and managing the software layer themselves. If you have the technical chops, the value is incredible.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Cheap GPUs: RunPod offers a wide range of NVIDIA GPUs, from consumer-grade RTX 4090s to data center workhorses like the H100, at some of the most competitive hourly rates you’ll find.

• Serverless endpoints: You can deploy your models on auto-scaling infrastructure, which means you only pay for the compute you actually use during inference. This is perfect for workloads with unpredictable traffic.

• Community templates: It provides a library of pre-configured templates for popular AI frameworks and apps, which can save you a ton of setup time.

Pricing:

RunPod’s pricing is refreshingly simple: you pay by the second for the GPU you rent. This makes it one of the most affordable options out there if all you need is raw compute power.

GPU Type	VRAM	Secure Cloud Price/Hour
RTX 4090	24 GB	~$0.34
RTX A6000	48 GB	~$0.33
H100 PCIe	80 GB	~$1.99
H200	141 GB	~$3.59

The Verdict: RunPod is the best choice for technical users who need affordable, powerful GPU infrastructure and prefer to have complete control over the software and deployment environment.

How to choose the right Predibase alternative for you

Okay, we’ve thrown a lot at you. So how do you actually choose? It all comes down to one simple question: Are you trying to build a model, or are you trying to solve a business problem?

The DIY Path (Predibase, Together AI, RunPod)

This path is for you if you have a dedicated technical team, a really unique problem that an off-the-shelf tool can’t solve, and the time and budget to manage the whole model lifecycle. The main perk is total control and a perfectly optimized custom model. The downside is the complexity, time, and money it takes to get there.

The Managed Application Path (eesel AI)

This path is for teams who want to solve a known business problem, like deflecting common support tickets or giving staff instant answers to internal questions, today. The platform handles all the underlying models, fine-tuning, and infrastructure for you. The benefit is getting value almost immediately with minimal effort. You trade some low-level control for a solution that just works.

This video explains the core concepts of fine-tuning and serving open-source LLMs, which is relevant for anyone considering Predibase alternatives.

Final thoughts: Look beyond the model to the solution

Choosing a Predibase alternative is about more than just comparing technical specs and pricing tables. It’s about matching the tool to your team’s skills, your budget, and, most importantly, your actual business goals.

While developer platforms like Together AI and RunPod offer incredible power and flexibility for building from scratch, they also require a big investment in technical resources. For a lot of businesses, the goal isn’t to become an expert in MLOps. It’s to reduce ticket volume, improve customer response times, or make internal knowledge easier to find.

If that sounds like you, a solution-focused platform like eesel AI delivers that business value much faster by taking care of all the technical heavy lifting for you. It’s a good reminder to focus on the problem you’re trying to solve, not just the tech you want to play with.

Ready to see how a solution-focused AI platform can help your support and IT teams? Start your free eesel AI trial and build your first AI agent in minutes, not months.