# Beam vs Lambda Cloud

> Beam has a score of 55.5 (C) against Lambda Cloud's 50.1 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 80 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-04

Beam has a score of 55.5 (C) against Lambda Cloud's 50.1 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 80 points.

- Beam: grade C, 55.5/100, rank #313 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/beam.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/beam.json
- Lambda Cloud: grade D, 50.1/100, rank #363 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/lambda.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/lambda.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Beam for reliability (+5), payments & pricing (+20), maintenance & community (+80), transparency & trust (+15).

Pick Lambda Cloud for schema & documentation (+11), agent ergonomics (+5), security & auth (+10).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Beam | Lambda Cloud | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 55 | 50 | Beam +5 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 69 | Lambda Cloud +11 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 63 | Lambda Cloud +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 50 | 60 | Lambda Cloud +10 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 20 | Beam +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 5 | Beam +80 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 74 | 59 | Beam +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **55.5 · C** | **50.1 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Beam | Lambda Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Beam | Lambda |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` | `https://cloud.lambda.ai/api/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | none |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | none |
| Popularity | 1.8k stars, 8.5k PyPI/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Beam.** Per-millisecond billing with cold starts and image pulls free, H100 PCIe at $3.50 and RTX 4090 at $0.69 an hour. No published request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA.

**Lambda Cloud.** H100 SXM at $3.99 and B200 at $6.69 an hour with per-minute billing. No scale to zero, autoscaling or endpoints; an idle VM bills until terminated.

## Before you call either

### Beam

1. Check the response body for `ok: false` on gateway calls; a failure can arrive as HTTP 200
2. Don't pipe `beam deploy --format json` output into CI logs, since it contains the workspace token
3. Route anything over 180 seconds to a task queue and poll the task instead of holding the endpoint request
4. Set `keep_warm_seconds` deliberately; the 180-second endpoint default bills three minutes of GPU after every call
5. Pass `gpu=["RTX4090", "A10G"]` so a job still schedules when one type is out

### Lambda Cloud

1. Call `GET /instance-types` first and read `regions_with_capacity_available` before trying to launch
2. Space launch calls 12 seconds apart; a sixth in a minute returns 429 with `global/rate-limited`
3. Branch on the error `code`, not the `message` or `suggestion`, which Lambda says may change
4. List instances before retrying a failed launch, since there's no idempotency key and a retry can start a second machine
5. Terminate the instance in a `finally` block; billing runs by the minute until you do

## Other comparisons with Beam or Lambda Cloud

- [Baseten vs Beam](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-beam.md)
- [Baseten vs Lambda Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/baseten-vs-lambda.md)
- [Beam vs Koyeb](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-koyeb.md)
- [Beam vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-modal.md)
- [Beam vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-northflank.md)
- [Beam vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Beam vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-runpod.md)
- [Koyeb vs Lambda Cloud](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koyeb-vs-lambda.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Modal](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-modal.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Northflank](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-northflank.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Replicate Deployments](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-replicate-deploy.md)
- [Lambda Cloud vs Runpod](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lambda-vs-runpod.md)