Mercor and Alignerr both pay experts weekly to train AI, but they screen, pay and hire differently. Mercor runs a 20-minute AI interview, background checks and 304 listings on this site; Alignerr, run by Labelbox, adds a one-shot Zara interview for some jobs and is open almost worldwide. Here is who should pick which, and how to do both.
If DataAnnotation has gone quiet, rejected you or never replied, there are more than twenty other platforms paying for AI training work. They differ on entry gates, published pay, payout rails and where they accept people from. Here they are grouped by who they suit, with the four names that turn out to be the same company as a platform you already know.
DataAnnotation and Outlier are the two names people weigh most often when they start AI training work. They differ in who they accept, how you get in, how pay is shown and how you are paid. Here is a side-by-side from each platform's own pages, what contributors report about each, and which suits whom.
Specialist AI training jobs pay more on average: a $75 an hour median against $50 for the general field, across 699 listings on this site. But language and audio specialisms pay less than generalist work, and the best generalist roles reach $140 to $200.
Of the 699 roles on this site, 201 are entry or junior level, and three platforms post all of them. What micro1, Mercor and Invisible Technologies each offer beginners, what the work pays, and which beginner listings are tied to one country.
Engineering is where AI training pays best, but the listings describe very different jobs under similar titles. Using more than a hundred engineering roles on this site, here are the five kinds of work (auditing, task authoring, environment building, reviewing agent output, building on pre-release models), what each pays, who gets in, and how to pick.
Five platforms come up again and again in remote AI training work in 2026, and each gates entry, publishes pay and pays out differently. Here is a side-by-side of what Mercor, micro1, Outlier, Alignerr and Handshake AI publish about entry, pay, payouts and eligibility, and which to apply to first depending on who you are.
Every listing shows its pay and who it is open to.