SaProt vs ESM-2 / ESMFold
SaProt: Protein language model with a structure-aware vocabulary combining amino acids with Foldseek 3Di tokens. ESM-2 / ESMFold: Protein language models and single-sequence structure prediction (Meta repo archived; models still widely used via Hugging Face).
Facts below come from each project's own website, repository and paper. We don't publish benchmark claims here; see the papers for evaluations.
| Field | SaProt | ESM-2 / ESMFold |
|---|---|---|
| Task | Embeddings, fitness and property prediction | Protein language model, structure prediction |
| Modalities | Sequence + 3Di structure tokens | Protein (single chain) |
| MSA required | No | No (single sequence) |
| Open weights | Yes (35M-1.3B) | Yes |
| GPU need | GPU recommended | — |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Pricing | Open source | Open source |
| Released | 2023-10-02 | 2022-07-21 |
| Paper | Link | Link |
| GitHub | GitHub | GitHub |
| GitHub stars | 639 | 4,170 |
| Interface | — | Package, Colab |
License and commercial use
| Field | SaProt | ESM-2 / ESMFold |
|---|---|---|
| Code license | MIT | MIT |
| Weights license | — | — |
| Commercial use | Permissive (commercial OK) | Permissive (commercial OK) |
| Answer | Yes. The recorded license is permissive, so closed-source commercial use is allowed if you keep the notices. Details | Yes. The recorded license is permissive, so closed-source commercial use is allowed if you keep the notices. Details |
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