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Hachi vs Twelve Labs

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Both have a free tier. Only Twelve Labs ships a public API.

HachiSelf-hosted plain-English search across your own videos and photos, with face grouping, indexed and queried entirely offline.Twelve LabsAPIs for video understanding — search, embed and analyze footage with the Marengo and Pegasus models

Side by side

FactHachiTwelve Labs
CategoryVideo Analysis & SearchVideo Analysis & Search
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Public APINoYes
PlatformsWebWeb, API
CompanyRamanLabsTwelveLabs, Inc.
Launched20232021
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Hachi

A genuinely private alternative to cloud photo search: the index and the queries never leave your machine, and the code is auditable under AGPLv3. The trade-off is that you are the sysadmin — x86_64 hardware, a local install, no mobile client, no hosted fallback. The commercial side looks half-abandoned even though the code is not.

Pros

  • Natural-language queries run across both video and image indexes locally
  • Face recognition groups people across the indexed library
  • Source is published on GitHub under AGPLv3 and was still being committed to in December 2025
  • Runs fully offline, so no media or query text leaves the machine

Cons

  • Requires x86_64 hardware and a manual self-host; there is no hosted option
  • The Gumroad link for the paid build 404s, so the commercial tier is effectively unavailable
  • The marketing page still carries a 2022 copyright and names no legal entity or country

Twelve Labs

The most direct route to adding real video search and Q&A to a product without training multimodal models yourself, priced by the minute rather than by seat. Costs scale linearly with archive size, so large libraries need budgeting up front, and free-tier indexes expiring after 90 days keeps that tier strictly for prototyping.

Pros

  • Purpose-built video models rather than frame-sampled image models
  • Transparent per-minute metered pricing with a real free tier
  • SDKs, playground and SOC 2 Type II support production use
  • Analyze handles continuous reasoning over long footage

Cons

  • Indexing costs accumulate quickly across thousands of hours
  • Free-tier indexes expire after 90 days
  • It is infrastructure, not a turnkey app — integration takes engineering

Which one fits

Choose Hachi if you need

  • People with large local video and photo archives who refuse to upload them
  • Homelab and NAS owners comfortable running a self-hosted service
  • Anyone who wants face grouping without a cloud provider holding the faces

Choose Twelve Labs if you need

  • Developers building search over large video archives
  • Media and sports teams automating highlights and logging
  • Products that need video Q&A or summarization via API

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