Google Cloud Workstations vs Lightning AI Studios
Google Cloud Workstations
cloud.google.comLightning AI Studios
lightning.aiSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Workstations | Lightning AI Studios |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.05/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 8.4 (#33) | 9.3 (#6) |
| Founded | 1998 | Lightning AI says founder William Falcon started the company in 2019 with Luis Capelo when it was called Grid.ai. |
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Purpose | Cloud Workstations provides fully managed development environments aimed at security-sensitive enterprises. | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. |
Plans
Google Cloud Workstations
- Workstation management fee$0.05 a month
- Control plane$0.20 a month
- Usage-based pricing — e2-standard-2 (us-central1)$0.17 a month
Lightning AI Studios
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Pro$20 a month
- Pro (annual)$20 a month
- Pro (monthly)$50 a month
- Teams$119 a month
- Teams (annual)$119 a month
- Teams (monthly)$140 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Google Cloud Workstations
Google Cloud Workstations has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Lightning AI Studios
Lightning AI Studios is a cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding collaboratively. Its persistent environments save installed packages, custom Python versions, and downloaded files. Studios offer browser-accessible VS Code and JupyterLab, plus AI copilots for AI and machine-learning work, including CUDA and PyTorch debugging. Teams can collaborate in real time on private projects, use a full-stack runtime, and deploy full-stack applications. Users can connect S3 buckets and EFS volumes through Lightning Drive, import models from Hugging Face and GitHub, or connect local IDEs such as VS Code, Cursor, and PyCharm over SSH. An SDK supports workflow automation. The Free plan is free and includes one active Studio, 50 GB persistent storage, and up to two concurrent GPUs; that Studio requires a restart every four hours. Pro and Teams plans have higher storage and GPU limits. Enterprise offers deployment in a customer VPC using AWS or GCP cloud credits.