Compare the best 4 phrase grounding models and try them on your own images, free in the Roboflow Playground. 4 are open-weight, so you can self-host them for free under their licenses.
4 models · 4 open-weight · 4 free to try · prices synced Oct 30, 2026
4 models with downloadable weights you can self-host under their licenses (Custom, Apache 2.0, and MIT). All run live in the Playground through hosted APIs, so self-hosting is optional.
Phrase grounding links a text phrase to the exact region it describes, resolving attributes and relations, not just class names. The choice is between grounding specialists and general VLMs.
Models built for grounding (Grounding DINO, Florence-2 with its grounding modes) return tight boxes for referring expressions like "the person holding the red umbrella" and are the right tool when the box itself is the product: selection interfaces, robotic pointing, precise multimodal search.
Frontier VLMs can ground phrases conversationally and then keep reasoning about the result, which suits assistant-style flows; their localization is generally looser than a specialist detector. If the pipeline consumes coordinates downstream, prefer the specialist; if a person consumes the answer, the VLM often suffices.
The bottom line: Pipelines that consume coordinates want a grounding specialist; conversational experiences can let a VLM ground and reason in one place.
Yes. 4 of the 4 phrase grounding models here are open-weight (for example Mistral Large 4, Qwen3.6 35B A3B, and Florence-2), free to self-host under their licenses (Custom, Apache 2.0, and MIT).
Yes. You can run all 4 in the Roboflow Playground for free. Upload an image and compare the models' output side by side, no setup required.
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