Axolotl vs torchtune

Axolotl wraps the messy parts of fine-tuning — dataset formatting, tokenization, LoRA and QLoRA configuration, multi-GPU sharding, gradient checkpointing — behind a single YAML config. It supports most mainstream open model families and both adapter and full fine-tunes, and it has become the de facto shared vocabulary of the open fine-tuning community, which means the config you need has usually already been written by someone else. The output is adapter weights on your disk, which you own outright.

torchtune is PyTorch's own fine-tuning library, built as readable, hackable training recipes rather than a framework with a configuration language on top. Nothing is hidden behind abstraction layers, which makes it the right choice when you need to change how training works rather than what it trains on — custom loss functions, unusual data pipelines, research variations. It is maintained inside the PyTorch project, so its dependency story is unusually clean.