Lightning AI Studios vs RenkuLab
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.aiRenkuLab
renkulab.ioSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | RenkuLab |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 1 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#6) | 7.9 (#70) |
| Deployment options | full_stack | full_stack |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Full-stack runtime | 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. | Renku is described as a platform for collaborative data science developed at the Swiss Data Science Center for researchers building projects from data, code, and compute resources. |
| 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. | Renku is a collaborative data science platform that brings together data, code, and compute resources from different sources. |
| Sharing controls | access_control | access_control |
| Support | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. | The Renku documentation links users to a community forum and lists [email protected] as an email contact. |
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.