Google Colab vs marimo
Google Colab
colab.research.google.com
marimo
marimo.ioSide by side
| Figure | Google Colab | marimo |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $8.33/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 3 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#4) | 8.7 (#24) |
| Spec score · Notebook Software | 9.2 (#2) | 8.6 (#8) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Intended users | Google describes Colab as useful for students, data scientists, AI researchers, educators, and researchers. | The maker lists AI engineers, analysts, educators, analytics engineers, data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and web developers as user groups. |
| Support | Users can report bugs or ask questions through Help > Send feedback in any Colab notebook. | The maker directs users with installation issues to GitHub or Discord and lists [email protected] for general contact. |
| What it does | Google Colab is a browser-based hosted Jupyter notebook service for Python, machine learning, data science and education that requires no local setup. | marimo is an open-source reactive Python notebook for reproducible experiments, data work, and building apps. |
Plans
Google Colab
- Colab Pro$8.33 a month
- Colab Pro+$41.66 a month
- ColabFree
- Colab freeFree
- Colab EnterprisePriced on request
- Colab ProPrice not published
- Colab Pro+Price not published
- Colab Pro / Pro+ / Pay As You GoPriced on request
- Pay As You GoPrice not published
In their own words
Google Colab
Google Colab lets users write and run Python in a browser without configuring a local environment, with access to GPUs and notebook sharing. Its hosted Jupyter notebooks combine executable code with rich text, images, HTML, and LaTeX. Data can come from Google Drive, spreadsheets, GitHub, and other sources, with Google Cloud Storage, Sheets, and BigQuery resources listed for integration. Colab AI can generate or transform code, explain Python libraries, suggest fixes, and perform multi-step data-analysis workflows. By default, it does not access Drive files or user secrets, though it can generate code to access them when explicitly requested. Google says generative-AI features collect prompts, related code, outputs, usage information, and feedback; human reviewers may process that data for up to 18 months. Free notebooks can run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage. Pro+ supports continuous execution up to 24 hours when enough compute units are available. Colab also has a Visual Studio Code extension and a beta, allowlist-gated API. Paid plans start at 8.33 USD/user/mo (annual).
marimo
marimo is an open-source reactive Python notebook for reproducible experiments, data work, and interactive apps. When a cell runs, dependent cells run as well or are marked stale, helping keep code and outputs consistent. Notebooks are stored as Python files that can be tracked with Git, run as scripts, or reused as modules. Users can build interfaces with sliders, dropdowns, dataframe tables, and selectable plots, then deploy notebooks as interactive web apps or run them in browsers through WebAssembly. SQL cells work with dataframes, databases, CSVs, and Google Sheets, with named backends including Polars, Pandas, PyArrow, DuckDB, SQLite, and Postgres. AI notebook features support OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, and compatible APIs. marimo has extensions for VS Code and PyCharm, with the VS Code extension also working in Cursor and other VS Code forks. The free hosted option molab provides 4 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, and sessions up to 12 hours; notebooks are public by default. Running notebook code can execute arbitrary code, so the maker advises using trusted notebooks or reviewing code first. The open-source notebook is free.