Lightning AI Studios vs Paperspace Gradient
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.aiPaperspace Gradient
paperspace.comSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | Paperspace Gradient |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | $8/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 | 9 | 17 |
| Spec score · Deep Learning Software | 9.1 (#1) | 8.8 (#3) |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#6) | 9.1 (#10) |
| Company headquarters and size | LinkedIn lists Lightning AI as privately held, headquartered in New York, with 51–200 employees. | Crunchbase lists Paperspace in New York, New York, with 11–50 employees. |
| Deployment options | full_stack | full_stack |
| Documentation depth | Documentation includes platform guides, CLI references, SDK references, AI Studio tutorials, deployment, cluster and organization material. | The documentation includes getting-started guides, how-to articles, concepts, reference material, limits, known issues, support pages, CLI references, and SDK/API examples. |
| 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 pricing page describes plans for beginners and individual ML/AI engineers, data scientists, researchers, teams, research groups, and startups. |
| Private projects | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. | Gradient is a machine learning platform for developing, tracking, and collaborating on machine learning models. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 4 reviews | Paperspace Core is rated 4.9 out of 5 from 10 reviews. |
| Rating on Trustpilot | 2.8 out of 5 from 6 reviews | Paperspace has a TrustScore of 1.5 out of 5 from 97 reviews. |
| Security | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. | Paperspace describes centralized permissions and activity logs, and says its security team monitors threats around the clock. |
| Self-hosting | LitServe can deploy to Lightning, a private VPC or any self-managed laptop or server. | Enterprise Gradient can be hosted on private cloud, on-premises infrastructure, or private clusters and is marketed as running without limits. |
| Support | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. | Paperspace lists free ticket-based support seven days a week and contract-based enterprise support with infrastructure assistance and customer success managers. |
| What it does | AI Studio is a persistent collaborative GPU workspace for training, inference, coding, agents and AI applications. | Paperspace is a cloud machine-learning platform for developing, training, and deploying AI applications with GPU-backed infrastructure. |
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
Paperspace Gradient
- Free (Individual)Free
- Pro (Individual)$8 a month
- Growth (Individual)$39 a month
- Free (Team)Free
- Pro (Team)$12 a month
- Growth (Team)$39 a month
- T0Free
- T1$12 a month
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
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.
Paperspace Gradient
Paperspace Gradient is a machine learning platform for building, tracking, and collaborating on models. Its browser-based IDE launches GPU-enabled Jupyter notebooks; teams can share projects, invite collaborators, and connect GitHub to manage code and compute resources. Notebook environments run in Docker containers. For deployment, Gradient serves models through API endpoints, with runtime, instance-type, and autoscaling choices. On-demand GPU and IPU instances are available, and paid instance utilization can cost extra beyond plan fees. Gradient supports major machine learning frameworks and libraries. Plans include free options and paid options listed from $8/mo; individual and team plans have different storage allowances, and notebook plans specify limits on notebooks and running sessions. Gradient is offered for beginners, ML/AI engineers, data scientists, researchers, teams, research groups, and startups. Paperspace also lists a Windows, macOS, and Linux beta desktop app, along with centralized permissions and activity logs.