StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. AI
  3. Text & Language Models
  4. NLP Sentiment Analysis
  5. FastText vs Flair

FastText vs Flair

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Flair
Flair
Stacks16
Followers53
Votes1
FastText
FastText
Stacks37
Followers65
Votes1
GitHub Stars26.4K
Forks4.8K

FastText vs Flair: What are the differences?

  1. FastText: FastText is a library for efficient learning of word representations and sentence classification. It uses a simple yet powerful approach of representing words as bags of character n-grams, allowing it to capture both morphological and semantic information of words.

  2. Flair: Flair is a framework for state-of-the-art natural language processing. It focuses on contextual word embeddings, which means it captures the meaning of a word based on its surrounding words in a sentence. Flair can be used for a variety of NLP tasks, including named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and text classification.

  3. Training Approach: FastText uses a supervised approach for training, where it requires labeled data to learn word representations and classify sentences. On the other hand, Flair utilizes a self-supervised approach, meaning it can train on large amounts of unlabeled data to capture contextual information without the need for explicit labels.

  4. Word Embeddings: While both FastText and Flair provide word embeddings, the way they generate these embeddings differ. FastText generates word embeddings based on character n-grams, allowing it to handle out-of-vocabulary words and capture subword information. Flair, on the other hand, creates contextual word embeddings by combining the embeddings of a word with its surrounding words in the sentence, capturing the semantic meaning of words in context.

  5. Language Support: FastText provides built-in support for over 150 languages, making it suitable for multilingual applications. Flair, on the other hand, has pre-trained models for a limited number of languages, mainly focused on English and some other popular languages. However, it allows for training custom models for other languages.

  6. Model Size and Speed: FastText models tend to be smaller in size compared to Flair models. This is because FastText uses bag of character n-grams, which results in more compact representations. Additionally, FastText is known for its fast training and inference speed, making it suitable for large-scale applications with limited computational resources.

In Summary, FastText and Flair differ in their training approach, word embedding generation, language support, and model size/speed. FastText uses character n-grams and a supervised approach, supports more languages, and has smaller models with faster speed. Flair focuses on contextual word embeddings, uses a self-supervised approach, has limited language support (primarily English), and may have larger models with slower training and inference speed.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Flair
Flair
FastText
FastText

Flair allows you to apply our state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models to your text, such as named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging (PoS), sense disambiguation and classification.

It is an open-source, free, lightweight library that allows users to learn text representations and text classifiers. It works on standard, generic hardware. Models can later be reduced in size to even fit on mobile devices.

A powerful NLP library; Multilingual; A text embedding library; A PyTorch NLP framework
Train supervised and unsupervised representations of words and sentences; Written in C++
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
26.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
4.8K
Stacks
16
Stacks
37
Followers
53
Followers
65
Votes
1
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1
    Open Source
Pros
  • 1
    Simple
Cons
  • 1
    No step by step API access
  • 1
    No in-built performance plotting facility or to get it
  • 1
    No step by step API support
Integrations
Python
Python
PyTorch
PyTorch
Python
Python
C++
C++
macOS
macOS
C#
C#

What are some alternatives to Flair, FastText?

rasa NLU

rasa NLU

rasa NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is a tool for intent classification and entity extraction. You can think of rasa NLU as a set of high level APIs for building your own language parser using existing NLP and ML libraries.

SpaCy

SpaCy

It is a library for advanced Natural Language Processing in Python and Cython. It's built on the very latest research, and was designed from day one to be used in real products. It comes with pre-trained statistical models and word vectors, and currently supports tokenization for 49+ languages.

Speechly

Speechly

It can be used to complement any regular touch user interface with a real time voice user interface. It offers real time feedback for faster and more intuitive experience that enables end user to recover from possible errors quickly and with no interruptions.

MonkeyLearn

MonkeyLearn

Turn emails, tweets, surveys or any text into actionable data. Automate business workflows and saveExtract and classify information from text. Integrate with your App within minutes. Get started for free.

Jina

Jina

It is geared towards building search systems for any kind of data, including text, images, audio, video and many more. With the modular design & multi-layer abstraction, you can leverage the efficient patterns to build the system by parts, or chaining them into a Flow for an end-to-end experience.

Sentence Transformers

Sentence Transformers

It provides an easy method to compute dense vector representations for sentences, paragraphs, and images. The models are based on transformer networks like BERT / RoBERTa / XLM-RoBERTa etc. and achieve state-of-the-art performance in various tasks.

CoreNLP

CoreNLP

It provides a set of natural language analysis tools written in Java. It can take raw human language text input and give the base forms of words, their parts of speech, whether they are names of companies, people, etc., normalize and interpret dates, times, and numeric quantities, mark up the structure of sentences in terms of phrases or word dependencies, and indicate which noun phrases refer to the same entities.

Transformers

Transformers

It provides general-purpose architectures (BERT, GPT-2, RoBERTa, XLM, DistilBert, XLNet…) for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) with over 32+ pretrained models in 100+ languages and deep interoperability between TensorFlow 2.0 and PyTorch.

Gensim

Gensim

It is a Python library for topic modelling, document indexing and similarity retrieval with large corpora. Target audience is the natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) community.

Amazon Comprehend

Amazon Comprehend

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to discover insights from text. Amazon Comprehend provides Keyphrase Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Entity Recognition, Topic Modeling, and Language Detection APIs so you can easily integrate natural language processing into your applications.

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope