Pick Lightning AI if
mL engineers who will burn the 5 free credits (and the free 4-CPU Studio), then buy hours — T4 $0.55/hr, H200 $4.50/hr — instead of renting a bare VM.
Read the Lightning AI pageLightning AI vs SkyPilot
Our take
Pick Lightning AI if mL engineers who will burn the 5 free credits (and the free 4-CPU Studio), then buy hours — T4 $0.55/hr, H200 $4.50/hr — instead of renting a bare VM. Pick SkyPilot if mL infra teams who already have GPUs or cloud accounts and will run sky launch (or the Hello Sky notebook), not a team looking for a $20 chat plan.
Best for
Lightning AI Code + GPU hours on a credit meter
SkyPilot Run training or inference on infra you already pay
Free plan
Lightning AI $0 · no card. 5 credits on signup; add a card for 25 more. One free 4-CPU Studio (restarts every 4 hours on Free). Phone verify unlocks up to 80 free GPU hours (SKU-dependent: T4 75, L4 31, L40S 5, A100 40GB 10, A100 80GB 5)
SkyPilot $0 · you pay AWS / GCP / RunPod / the Kubernetes bill
Lowest paid
Lightning AI On-demand GPU (Lightning cloud) $0.55
SkyPilot Not published by the vendor
Runs where
Lightning AI
SkyPilot Hosted
Watch out
Lightning AI The free CPU Studio restarts every 4 hours
SkyPilot You bring the GPU
Last checked
Lightning AI 2026-10-22 · lightning.ai/pricing
SkyPilot 2026-10-22 · github.com/skypilot-org/skypilot/blob
Which one, then?
Pick SkyPilot if
mL infra teams who already have GPUs or cloud accounts and will run sky launch (or the Hello Sky notebook), not a team looking for a $20 chat plan.
Read the SkyPilot page