Unsloth vs Axolotl vs TRL vs LLaMA-Factory: A Fine-Tuning Framework Comparison on Speed, VRAM, and Multi-GPU

Unsloth, Axolotl, TRL, and LLaMA-Factory are compared on speed, VRAM, and multi-GPU scaling. Unsloth shows 2x training speed for Llama 3.1 8B and 7.3x for MoE models. Axolotl delivers up to 1.45x speedup with SonicMoE LoRA support, while TRL is the reference implementation layer. LLaMA-Factory exposes other projects' work through config flags, reporting 170% relative speed with Unsloth integration.