Kita vs Lightning AI Studios
Kita
getkita.orgLightning AI Studios
lightning.aiSide by side
| Figure | Kita | Lightning AI Studios |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | £8.25/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 9 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 7.9 (#69) | 9.3 (#6) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Kita is a live workspace for computing education where students code and collaborate and instructors get real-time insight and integrated assessment. | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. |
| Real-time collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Kita offers support by email, phone on weekdays from 9am to 5pm GMT, and school webinars or support calls. | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. |
Plans
Kita
- TeacherFree
- Multiple Teachers£99 a year
- CoderFree
- School-wide & TrustsPriced on request
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
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.