Lightning AI Studios vs Ray Train
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.aiRay Train
ray.ioSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | Ray Train |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 1 |
| Spec score · Deep Learning Software | 9.1 (#1) | 7.4 (#25) |
| 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. | Ray’s security documentation describes Ray developers running local single-node clusters or remote multi-node clusters on infrastructure provided by platform providers. |
| Purpose | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. | Ray Train distributes model training compute to worker processes across a Ray cluster. |
| Security | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. | Ray supports built-in token authentication starting in version 2.52.0, while its security guidance calls for controlled networks and trusted code. |
| Support | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. | The Ray site offers a community Slack, forums, and documentation, and says Anyscale offers hands-on training and expert support. |
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.