Lightning AI Studios vs Replit
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.ai
Replit
replit.comSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | Replit |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | $18/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 6 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#6) | 9.5 (#1) |
| Founded | Lightning AI says founder William Falcon started the company in 2019 with Luis Capelo when it was called Grid.ai. | 2016 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The Studio documentation describes connecting S3 buckets and EFS volumes through Lightning Drive and importing models from Hugging Face and GitHub. | Listed integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Replit Auth, Firebase Auth, Google OAuth, Stripe, PayPal, Slack, Twilio, Telegram, Airtable, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Sheets, and Dropbox. |
| Security | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. | Replit says it is SOC 2 Type II audited annually by an independent CPA firm and has an Advanced Bitsight rating. |
| Support | Lightning lists email, Discord, and Twitter as support channels, and a dedicated Slack channel for enterprise support. | Support resources include documentation, a community forum, a support ticket form for account or billing issues, and a system status page. |
| What it does | AI Studio is a persistent collaborative GPU workspace for training, inference, coding, agents and AI applications. | Replit is an agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. |
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
Replit
- StarterFree
- Replit Core$18 a month
- Replit Core$18 a month
- Replit Pro$90 a month
- Replit Pro$90 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.
Replit
Replit is a software creation platform where users can describe applications in natural language and refine them with an AI agent. The agent works through chat, tests and revises code, and can use a browser to produce reports and address issues. Its cloud development environment supports coding and collaboration in a browser, with automatic package installation and built-in authentication, database, hosting, and monitoring. Replit supports websites, mobile projects, designs, slides, animations, data visualizations, 3D, games, documents, and spreadsheets, with more than 100 integrations. The free Starter plan includes daily usage, but limits publishing to one live project and running one background task at a time. Replit Core costs $18 per month billed annually, and Pro costs $90 per month billed annually. Pro supports up to 15 collaborators and 50 viewers, and includes database rollback for up to 28 days. Replit is available on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, and web. Its mobile apps support building, sharing, and publishing web apps; native iOS development uses the web version with Expo Go previews.