Hugging Face Inference API (Embeddings)

https://huggingface.co/docs/api-inference

HF's hosted Inference API and Inference Endpoints — serve any model from the Hub including the BGE/GTE/E5 embedding families.

Active · Verified 2026-10-27 · fresh as of 2026-10-27 · 22 cited facts, 2 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction

At a glance

Tier
T1
Created
2022 vendor fix
Funding
searched not found fix
Freshness
2026-10-27 fix
Layer
model-infra repo fix
Licensing
commercial repo fix
Deployment locus
cloud vendor fix
Platform vs product
platform vendor fix
Accelerator
betaworks-camp-2016 third-party fix
SDK languages
python, rest, typescript vendor fix
Compliance
gdpr, soc2-type2 vendor fix

When to use

Optimised for: searched not found

Anti-fit: searched not found

Pros & cons

Pros

searched not found

Cons

searched not found

Claims & capabilities

searched not found

Technical surface

API surface
REST API, Python SDK (huggingface_hub), JavaScript SDK (@huggingface/inference)
Backend storage
searched not found
Deployment
Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — managed Inference Providers and Inference Endpoints; self-hosted Text Embeddings Inference (TEI)
Embedding model
searched not found
Multi-tenancy
searched not found
MCP
yes — official Hugging Face MCP Server (huggingface/hf-mcp-server)
A2A
searched not found
OpenTelemetry
searched not found

Compare Hugging Face Inference API (Embeddings) with…

Similar systems

Other embedding & reranker services in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.

  • Voyage AI (MongoDB) T1

    Specialised embedding and reranker provider — voyage-3, voyage-multilingual, voyage-finance, voyage-law, voyage-code. Acquired by MongoDB Feb 2025 for $220M.

  • Cohere Embed T1

    Cohere's hosted embedding models, now Embed 5 (2026-09-30; Pro and Fast tiers): text, image and fused text-plus-image inputs, 100+ languages, 128K-token context, Matryoshka output dimensions from 256 to 2048 with float, int8 and binary formats. Reranker API (Rerank 5).

  • Jina AI Embeddings T1

    Jina AI's embedding family — jina-embeddings-v3 (multilingual), jina-clip-v2 (text+image), jina-colbert-v2. Open-weights + hosted API + ColBERT-style.

  • OpenAI Embeddings T1

    OpenAI's hosted embedding API — text-embedding-3-small, text-embedding-3-large. Most widely used commercial embedding API in OSS RAG/memory stacks.

  • Sentence Transformers T1

    Reimers & Gurevych's library for training sentence embeddings — substrate under most open-weight embedding models. Now under Hugging Face.

  • Mistral Embed T2

    Mistral AI's hosted embedding API — mistral-embed; available via Mistral La Plateforme and Azure AI.

Sources (21 cited facts, 2 third-party)

Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).

What changed

Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)

  1. 2026-10-27
    • License first recorded as “proprietary service; huggingface_hub SDK Apache-2.0; Text Embeddings Inference Apache-2.0” source
    • Latest release first recorded as “v2.3.0 (2026-10-23) — huggingface_hub” source
    • Pricing first recorded as “Inference Providers pay-as-you-go at provider rates with no Hugging Face markup; PRO users get $2.00/month credits, Team/Enterprise $2.00 per seat; Inference Endpoints billed hourly per instance” source
    • Deployment first recorded as “Both (self-hosted + managed cloud) — managed Inference Providers and Inference Endpoints; self-hosted Text Embeddings Inference (TEI)” source
    • MCP support first recorded as “yes — official Hugging Face MCP Server (huggingface/hf-mcp-server)” source
    #274

Related systems

Referenced by (9)

  • Chroma integrates with — Chroma's docs have a Hugging Face embedding-function page that calls the Hugging Face Inference API. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Haystack (framework) integrates with — Haystack integrations directory has a Hugging Face API integration page ("Use models through Hugging Face APIs - Inference Providers, Inference Endpoints, TGI and TEI"). (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Langflow integrates with — Langflow components bundle: Hugging Face API / embeddings inference components. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official embeddings integration package llama-index-embeddings-huggingface-api in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — n8n built-in AI cluster node: Embeddings Hugging Face Inference node. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Phidata (now Agno) integrates with — Agno ships a huggingface embedder (agno.knowledge.embedder.huggingface). (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Supabase Vector integrates with — Supabase AI integrations: Hugging Face models via Inference API. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Together AI integrates with — Together AI docs third-party/agent integrations: Hugging Face Inference integration guide. (verified 2026-10-29)
  • Weaviate integrates with — Weaviate has a Hugging Face model-provider integration that calls the Hugging Face Inference API for embeddings. (verified 2026-10-29)