JupyterLab vs Lightning AI Studios
JupyterLab
jupyter.orgLightning AI Studios
lightning.aiSide by side
| Figure | JupyterLab | Lightning AI Studios |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.1 (#9) | 9.3 (#6) |
| Documentation depth | Documentation includes user guides, developer material, an extension migration guide, API reference, security guidance and a detailed changelog. | Documentation includes platform guides, CLI references, SDK references, AI Studio tutorials, deployment, cluster and organization material. |
| Founded | 2014 | Lightning AI says founder William Falcon started the company in 2019 with Luis Capelo when it was called Grid.ai. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Intended users | JupyterLab is focused on interactive, exploratory computing and is suited to workflows such as data science, scientific computing, computational journalism, and machine learning. | The pricing page describes Free for students, researchers, and hobbyists; Pro for developers, researchers, and scientists; and Teams for research labs and small teams. |
| Purpose | JupyterLab is a web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code, and data. | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 3 reviews | 4.5 out of 5 from 4 reviews |
| Security | JavaScript and HTML outputs in notebooks created on other machines are sanitized and not displayed until the notebook is trusted. | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. |
| Self-hosting | JupyterLab is installed and launched locally with the `jupyter lab` command, so organizations can operate it on their own computers or servers. | LitServe can deploy to Lightning, a private VPC or any self-managed laptop or server. |
| What it does | JupyterLab is a web-based environment for interactive and reproducible computing with notebooks, terminals, text editors, file browsing and rich outputs. | AI Studio is a persistent collaborative GPU workspace for training, inference, coding, agents and AI applications. |
Plans
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
JupyterLab
JupyterLab is a web-based environment for interactive work with notebooks, code and data. Its workspace brings notebooks, text editors, terminals and custom components together in tabs and splitters. Code consoles act as scratchpads, and kernel-backed documents can run code in files such as Markdown, Python, R and LaTeX. It supports the .ipynb format used by classic Jupyter Notebook, and can view and edit formats including Markdown, images, CSV, JSON, HTML, LaTeX and PDF. Visualization libraries include matplotlib and Plotly; interactive plots or widgets may require additional packages. Extensions can add themes, viewers, editors, output renderers and interface controls, but can execute code in the browser, server and kernel, so only trusted extensions are advised. Real-time collaboration can be enabled with jupyter_collaboration. JavaScript and HTML outputs from notebooks created elsewhere remain hidden until the notebook is trusted. JupyterLab is free, open-source software under a modified BSD license, installed with pip or via a Homebrew command for macOS and Linux. It runs on Linux, macOS, the web and self-hosted systems.
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.