# Unsloth vs Vertex AI Gemini tuning

> Vertex AI Gemini tuning has a score of 64.2 (B) against Unsloth's 51.7 (D). Both do finetune sft. The largest gap is transparency & trust, 55 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/unsloth-vs-vertex-ai-tuning
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/unsloth-vs-vertex-ai-tuning.md (~1,450 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/unsloth-vs-vertex-ai-tuning.min.md (~330 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/unsloth-vs-vertex-ai-tuning.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-04

Vertex AI Gemini tuning has a score of 64.2 (B) against Unsloth's 51.7 (D). Both do finetune sft. The largest gap is transparency & trust, 55 points.

- Unsloth: grade D, 51.7/100, rank #347 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/unsloth.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/unsloth.json
- Vertex AI Gemini tuning: grade B, 64.2/100, rank #190 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/vertex-ai-tuning.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/vertex-ai-tuning.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Unsloth for agent ergonomics (+5), payments & pricing (+40).

Pick Vertex AI Gemini tuning for reliability (+24), schema & documentation (+16), security & auth (+36), transparency & trust (+55).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Unsloth | Vertex AI Gemini tuning | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 43 | 67 | Vertex AI Gemini tuning +24 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 66 | 82 | Vertex AI Gemini tuning +16 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 53 | 48 | Unsloth +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 35 | 71 | Vertex AI Gemini tuning +36 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 20 | Unsloth +40 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 82 | 80 | Unsloth +2 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 34 | 89 | Vertex AI Gemini tuning +55 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **51.7 · D** | **64.2 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Unsloth | Vertex AI Gemini tuning |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Agent framework | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Unsloth | Google Cloud |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://us-central1-aiplatform.googleapis.com/v1` |
| Transports |  | HTTP |
| Auth | None | OAuth |
| Pricing | Free | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (core), AGPL-3.0 (Studio UI) | Apache-2.0 (SDK) |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-10-01 |
| Popularity | 77k stars, 230k PyPI/wk | 3.9k stars, 32.9M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | 2.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Unsloth.** The Apache-2.0 core runs on customer hardware and keeps model weights there. Users supply and pay for the GPU.

**Vertex AI Gemini tuning.** Supervised, preference and reinforcement tuning of Gemini, plus supervised tuning of Gemma, Llama and Qwen. No weight export. The tuned model exists only as a Google Cloud endpoint.

## Before you call either

### Unsloth

1. Install with `uv pip install unsloth --torch-backend=auto` on a CUDA machine; the desktop app is for people
2. Start from the notebook for the model family in unslothai/notebooks; it sets LoRA targets and the chat template
3. Save the LoRA adapter while iterating and merge to 16-bit or GGUF only when you ship
4. If Studio must be reachable by other agents, pass --disable-tools and keep it on 127.0.0.1 behind a tunnel
5. Pin the exact unsloth version; releases land several times a week and don't flag breaking changes

### Vertex AI Gemini tuning

1. Use `client.tunings.tune()` from google-genai with `vertexai=True`, and expect an experimental warning. Tuning isn't available on the Gemini Developer API
2. Add `.md.txt` to any docs.cloud.google.com URL to read the page as Markdown
3. Tune Gemini 3.5 Flash or 3.1 Flash-Lite. The 2.5 models retire on 2026-10-20
4. List jobs with a filter before re-sending a create after a timeout. There's no request ID to deduplicate it
5. Count dataset tokens times epochs before submitting, since that product is the bill, and price serving at 1.5x base for Gemini 3 tunes

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