Hugging Face Hub
Hugging FaceHosted platform at huggingface.co where any account holder publishes models, datasets and Spaces apps as Git repositories, versioned with commits, branches and tags. Full-text search indexes model and dataset cards, and an HTTP API with a published OpenAPI specification lets other tools list, create and download repositories by name. Hugging Face runs it with free public hosting and paid Team and Enterprise plans for private collaboration.
Scored as the hosted Hub. The huggingface_hub Python client is a separate entry in ML frameworks, and Spaces, the app-hosting surface, is a separate entry in deployment.
Openness
1 high confidence- license
- proprietary(hosted service
- source
- closed(hosted service
The Hub is a service Hugging Face operates, and its server code is not published; the repository named after it holds documentation. The open libraries that talk to it are separate products and do not make the platform itself self-hostable.
- https://huggingface.co/terms-of-service recorded 2026-09-27
The terms list the "Open-Source Libraries" (Transformers, Datasets, Tokenizers) separately from the "Hugging Face public Hub" and "Hugging Face private Hub", both services operated by Hugging Face, Inc.
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/huggingface/hub-docs/HEAD/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
"This repository regroups documentation and information that is hosted on the Hugging Face website." The public repository is the Hub's documentation, not its server.
Adoption
5 medium confidenceHugging Face counts every file download the Hub serves, and the busiest single model repositories draw well over ten million downloads a month on their own. That is platform traffic rather than a count of people, and no total across all repositories is published.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models?sort=downloads&limit=5 recorded 2026-09-27
Top five models by downloads; sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 shows downloads 245656284 and cross-encoder/ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v2 87160224, fetched 2026-09-27.
- https://huggingface.co/docs/huggingface_hub/package_reference/hf_api recorded 2026-09-27
"downloads (int) — Number of downloads of the model over the last 30 days."
- https://huggingface.co/models recorded 2026-09-27
"Models 3,098,427" on the public model listing, 2026-09-27.
Capability
5 high confidenceAnyone with an account can publish, every model, dataset and app is a Git repository with its own history, branches and tags, and the same repositories are reachable by git and by a documented HTTP API. That covers publishing, versioning, discovery and retrieval for three kinds of artifact, which is the most complete registry in the category.
- https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/api recorded 2026-09-27
"We have open endpoints that you can use to retrieve information from the Hub as well as perform certain actions such as creating model, dataset or Space repos." The OpenAPI spec is at /.well-known/openapi.json.
- https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/models-uploading recorded 2026-09-27
"To upload models to the Hub, you'll need to create an account at Hugging Face." Models are "Git-based repositories, which give you versioning, branches, discoverability and sharing features".
- https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/repositories recorded 2026-09-27
"Models, Spaces, and Datasets are hosted on the Hugging Face Hub as Git repositories, which means that version control and collaboration are core elements of the Hub."
- https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/search recorded 2026-09-27
"We index model cards, dataset cards, and Spaces app.py files." for full-text search.
Verified 2026-09-27