spaCy
Shares rank 17 of 19 machine learning libraries by recommenders
Free open-source NLP library, often much faster than API-based options, and it runs locally without third-party calls. Some users note it needs configuring.
Free open-source NLP library, often much faster than API-based options, and it runs locally without third-party calls. Some users note it needs configuring.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 71%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 2.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast, runs without third-party APIs
“orders of magnitude faster, and sometimes better too for that specific task”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Jev – A curation of Jev demos on X, tools, skills, and integrations” “It would probably be faster, and you'd avoid a third party API dependency.”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Jev – A curation of Jev demos on X, tools, skills, and integrations” Well-liked, nice project
“I always thought spaCy was a very nice project in that space.”
Comment from 26 Apr 2026 in “OpenAI model for masking personally identifiable information (PII) in text” “I like spacy though you have to configure it a bit”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “So you wanna build a local RAG?”
Other machine learning libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other machine learning libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 19 machine learning libraries, rankedWhat people said
7 of the 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“spacy splits out "the biggest beer" and "the world"”
“orders of magnitude faster, and sometimes better too for that specific task”
“It would probably be faster, and you'd avoid a third party API dependency.”
“I always thought spaCy was a very nice project in that space.”
“since this is a bug in spacey”
“Spacy NER, BGE-M3 embeddings.”
“I like spacy though you have to configure it a bit”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.