Lightning AI Studios vs Whole Tale
Lightning AI Studios
lightning.aiWhole Tale
wholetale.orgSide by side
| Figure | Lightning AI Studios | Whole Tale |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 0 |
| Spec score · Coding Playgrounds | 9.3 (#6) | 7.5 (#100) |
| Data integrations | Data connections support AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Cloudflare R2, AWS EFS and Snowflake. | The documentation lists Zenodo, Dataverse, Globus, DataONE, and DERIVA as supported external data sources, with DERIVA support described as being tested. |
| Founded | Lightning AI says founder William Falcon started the company in 2019 with Luis Capelo when it was called Grid.ai. | 2016 |
| Full-stack runtime | Yes | No |
| Purpose | AI Studio is a persistent, collaborative GPU cloud workspace for training models, running inference, building agents and AI apps, and coding together. | Whole Tale is an open-source, web-based platform for creating, publishing, and running reproducible research objects called Tales. |
| Real-time collaboration | Yes | No |
| Security | Lightning says it is SOC 2 compliant for AWS and GCP clouds in all regions. | The documentation says Whole Tale uses Globus Auth for authentication and access to data on users’ behalf through the Globus network. |
| 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 project invites users to join its Slack workspace or email list to ask questions and participate in community discussion. |
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.
Whole Tale
Whole Tale has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.