The best PyG alternatives

6 tools that do a similar job to PyG, 6 of them open source. Each entry says what it does and who it suits, so you can pick the one that fits instead of the most famous.

You're replacing

PyG

A PyTorch library for building and training graph neural networks on structured data.

1. 1

   Weights & Biases

   Open source · MIT · ★ 11.3k

   Python library to track, visualize, and manage machine learning experiments and models.

   Best for: Machine learning engineers who want to compare training runs over time; Researchers tuning hyperparameters across many experiments

   Full review PyG vs Weights & Biases
2. 2

   ONNX Runtime

   Open source · MIT · ★ 22.2k

   A cross-platform library for running and training machine learning models quickly.

   Best for: Developers who want to deploy a trained model inside an application or service; Teams running the same model across Windows, Linux, macOS, or ARM devices

   Full review
3. 3

   Nano-vLLM

   Open source · MIT · ★ 16.3k

   A small, readable Python re-implementation of vLLM for running language models quickly.

   Best for: Developers who want to understand how LLM inference engines work internally; Students studying LLM serving and optimization techniques

   Full review
4. 4

   LoRA

   Open source · MIT · ★ 13.9k

   Python package loralib for adapting large PyTorch language models with small trainable low-rank matrices.

   Best for: Machine learning engineers adapting RoBERTa, DeBERTa or GPT-2 style models in PyTorch; Researchers reproducing the LoRA paper's GLUE or GPT-2 experiments

   Full review
5. 5

   pytorch-grad-cam

   Open source · MIT · ★ 13k

   Python library that shows which parts of an image a computer vision model looked at to make its prediction.

   Best for: Researchers comparing explainability methods for image models; Engineers debugging CNN or Vision Transformer classifiers in PyTorch

   Full review
6. 6

   Petals

   Open source · MIT · ★ 10.7k

   Run big language models by sharing the work across volunteers' GPUs, BitTorrent-style.

   Best for: Developers who want to experiment with large open models like Llama 3.1 or BLOOM without owning the hardware to run them alone; Researchers prompt-tuning large models on their own tasks

   Full review

How we pick: tools in the same category that solve the same problem, projects that name each other as alternatives, and open-source projects that describe themselves as an alternative to PyG. We don't take payment for placement.