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How Hangar compares

Teams that want models and datasets on their own infrastructure usually look at one of three kinds of tool: a caching proxy in front of huggingface.co, a full self-hosted hub, or an MLOps model registry. Hangar is a self-hosted hub: it serves the Hugging Face Hub API, keeps Mirrors with their git history, and also accepts your own uploads.

This page compares Hangar with tools people evaluate alongside it. Each fact about another tool comes from that tool's own documentation or source code, checked on 20 October 2026, and linked in Sources. Tools change, so check their current documentation before you decide.

At a glance

"Not documented" means the tool's own documentation does not say.

Hangar olah JFrog Artifactory Sonatype Nexus CSGHub MLflow Model Registry
Self-hosted Yes Yes Yes, or SaaS Yes, or cloud Yes Yes
Licence Elastic License 2.0 MIT Commercial Community Edition or Pro Apache-2.0 Apache-2.0
Downloads with HF_ENDPOINT Yes Yes Yes Not documented Yes No
Uploads with huggingface_hub Yes No Yes, to local repositories No, proxy only Yes No
Datasets Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
How it fetches from huggingface.co Pulls Mirrors with git history and Commit SHAs, whole Repos or selected files, plus optional Pull-through Caches file blocks as clients download them Caches files as clients download them Caches files as clients download them Admins run mirror tasks that sync whole Repos Does not fetch
git clone with git-lfs Yes No Not documented Not documented Yes No
ollama pull Yes No Not documented Not documented Not documented No
Xet uploads from hf_xet Yes Partial Yes, with huggingface_hub up to 1.19.0 Not yet Not documented No
Web UI for browsing Yes, with a Dataset Viewer Basic Yes Yes Yes Yes
Air-gapped use Yes, fed from another Instance Yes, serves only what is cached Not documented Not documented Not documented Not documented

Caching proxies: olah, Artifactory and Nexus

A caching proxy sits in front of huggingface.co and keeps a copy of what clients download. It is the smallest change for teams that only need faster or controlled downloads.

  • olah is a lightweight mirror server. It caches files block by block as clients ask for them, and an offline mode serves only what is already cached. It has no upload routes.
  • JFrog Artifactory has remote Hugging Face repositories that cache huggingface.co, and local repositories you can upload to with upload_folder. It suits organisations that already run Artifactory for other package types.
  • Sonatype Nexus Repository supports Hugging Face as a proxy repository for models and datasets. It has no hosted Hugging Face repositories, so you cannot upload to it.

Choose Hangar over a proxy when you want Mirrors that keep the upstream git history and Commit SHAs, so a model pinned to a Commit still resolves after upstream changes, or when you also need uploads, git, Ollama or LM Studio.

Self-hosted hubs: CSGHub

CSGHub from OpenCSG is a self-hosted hub with a web UI, git access through Gitea, and dataset previews. Admins run mirror tasks that sync whole Repos from upstream hubs.

Hangar differs in scope: it serves GGUF models straight to Ollama and LM Studio, pulls only the files you choose, such as one quantisation, as a Partial mirror, and runs as a single binary or container with SQLite, or with Postgres and S3-compatible storage.

Model registries: MLflow

MLflow Model Registry tracks model versions, aliases and lineage for models you train and log with MLflow. It does not serve the Hugging Face Hub API, so huggingface_hub, transformers and HF_ENDPOINT do not work with it.

The two can work together: MLflow for experiment tracking and model lineage, and Hangar to store the weights and serve them to Hugging Face clients, git, Ollama and LM Studio.

Hugging Face Team and Enterprise

Hugging Face's paid plans add organisation features such as single sign-on, audit logs and a choice of US or EU storage regions. The plans page does not offer a self-hosted or on-premises option, so the files stay on huggingface.co.

Choose Hangar when the files must stay on your own servers or network, including air-gapped networks.

What Hangar does not do

Hangar stores and serves files; it does not run models. Spaces, the Inference API, SSH git and Xet downloads are out of scope. For the Hub API endpoints Hangar serves, see Hub API compatibility.

Sources

Checked on 20 October 2026.