Lightning AI Studios vs marimo
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.ai
marimo
marimo.ioSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | marimo |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 3 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#6) | 8.7 (#24) |
| Founded | Lightning AI says founder William Falcon started the company in 2019 with Luis Capelo when it was called Grid.ai. | 2024 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Intended users | The pricing page describes Free for students, researchers, and hobbyists; Pro for developers, researchers, and scientists; and Teams for research labs and small teams. | The maker lists AI engineers, analysts, educators, analytics engineers, data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and web developers as user groups. |
| Security | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. | marimo says no user code runs without explicit user action, and notebooks opened in edit mode are statically loaded rather than executed as Python modules. |
| Support | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. | The maker directs users with installation issues to GitHub or Discord and lists [email protected] for general contact. |
| What it does | AI Studio is a persistent collaborative GPU workspace for training, inference, coding, agents and AI applications. | marimo is an open-source reactive Python notebook for reproducible experiments, data work, and building apps. |
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
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.
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.