Comparing CoCalc to the Competition
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These comparisons were made in good faith; however, they may contain errors, since we know CoCalc better and the products are constantly improving. Contact benedikt.ehinger@vis.uni-stuttgart.de if anything looks wrong or incomplete!
Online Jupyter Notebooks learn more
| Feature | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Programming languages | Python, Sage, R, Octave, and many more | Python, R, etc. and customizable | Python 3 | Python 3 | Python 3, Quip |
| IPython Widgets | |||||
| File sharing between users | |||||
| Realtime collaboration: multiple people use the same notebook together | Possible via experimental extension to JupyterLab. | Colab used to have realtime sync, but it ended in 2017, when Google terminated their realtime API product. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2017/11/committed-to-storage-apis-retiring.html | |||
| Persistence | Notebook persists, but data and files do not. | ||||
| Large preinstalled software environment | 1500+ Python libraries preinstalled; extensive R, Julia, Octave, and other packages. https://cocalc.com/software/python | Limited | Python3, SQL, Scala, R, and Kotlin kernels; large pre-installed env with top data science packages | 27 featured Python packages https://docs.deepnote.com/environment/pre-installed-packages | |
| Paid Plans | Basic - $2 person/month; Pro - scales linearly depending on the resources you need https://cocalc.com/store | Free only | Pro - $9.99 person/month; Pro+ - $49.99 person/month https://colab.research.google.com/signup/pricing | Pro - $19.90 person/month; Enterprise - $125 person/month https://www.jetbrains.com/datalore/enterprise/ | Pro - $12 person/month; Enterprise - $99 person / month; plus an additional hourly fee for more powerful compute resources at about 7x the market rate https://deepnote.com/pricing |
| Disk space | 3GB/project for free | Ephemeral | Uses your Google Drive storage | Limit of two simultaneously running notebooks | 5GB for free |
| Memory | 1GB/project for free | Limit of two simultaneously running notebooks | several GB for free | ||
| Idle timeout | 30 minutes for free; pay for more | 15 minutes for free; pay for more | |||
| Network access | Only for non-free projects (due to abuse) | ||||
| Public Google-indexed searchable publishing of files | Paid | ||||
| Self hosting | https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc-docker#readme | https://www.jetbrains.com/datalore/enterprise/ | |||
| Open source | Partial (AGPLv3 + noncommercial use clause) https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc | Some components are open https://github.com/googlecolab | Some of their modifications to upstreams projects are open source https://github.com/deepnote | ||
| GPUs | Only when self hosted | Only when self hosted | Yes, for free, and even better when paid. | Datalore Professional and when self-hosted |
Online LaTeX Editors learn more
| Feature | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Realtime collaboration and sync | Limited number of collaborators | |||
| PDFLaTeX rendering engine | ||||
| XeLaTeX rendering engine | ||||
| LuaTeX rendering engine | ||||
| Run Python, R and other scripts as part of compilation | CoCalc is particularly good at this. | But limited. | ||
| R/Knitr | Limited - very few packages, limited syntax, no caching, slow | |||
| SageTex | ||||
| PythonTex | ||||
| Upload files | ||||
| Forward and inverse search | N/A | |||
| Multifile support | N/A | |||
| WYSIWYG | This is only a partial WYSIWYG-like mode. | |||
| Equation editor | ||||
| Bibliography | Only BibTex via LaTeX (nothing sophisticated) | Limited | ||
| Preloaded journal templates | However, you can easily upload a template from a journal. | |||
| Self hosting |
Online Linux Terminal learn more
| Feature | GCE/AWS/Azure Clouds | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free access for unlimited time | Limited trial with credit card | |||
| Full Linux | ||||
| Count of of pre-installed packages, by running 'apt list --installed | wc -l' or 'rpm -qa | wc -l' | ~ 9500 | N/A | ~ 200 | ~ 700 |
| Copy/paste | ||||
| Periodic backups of your data | ||||
| Persistent of your data | ||||
| Ease of setup and configuration | Easy | Hard | Very Easy | Medium |
| Root access | Limited |
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