Lightning AI Studios
8.5#8 in coding playgroundsFrom $20 a monthFree planWebAPILinuxmacOS
VisitLightning AI Studios vs Playcode
What both publish
| Fact | Lightning AI Studios | Playcode |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | The developer surface supports Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop and other MCP clients. |
| 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. | Playcode describes the Cloud runtime as intended for business websites, MVPs, client portals, dashboards, internal tools, and small full-stack apps, including for nontechnical users. |
| Private projects | Yes | Yes |
Lightning AI Studios plans
- FreeFree
- Pro$20 a month
- Pro (annual)$20 a month
- Pro (monthly)$50 a month
- Teams (annual)$119 a month
- Teams$119 a month
Playcode plans
- FreeFree
- Pro$25 a month
- Max$100 a month
- Top-up 100 credits$25, paid once
- Top-up 210 credits$50, paid once
- Top-up 440 credits$100, paid once
Pick Lightning AI Studios if…
The Free plan is described for students, researchers and hobbyists. Pro is aimed at developers, researchers and scientists, while Teams is described for research labs and small teams.
Pick Playcode if…
Playcode is aimed at people building business websites, MVPs, client portals, dashboards, internal tools, and small full-stack apps, including nontechnical users. It may also suit developers who want access to the underlying code and the option to move projects elsewhere.