# Beam vs Modal

> Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) against Beam's 55.5 (C). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is security & auth, 18 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) against Beam's 55.5 (C). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is security & auth, 18 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
- Modal: grade B, 63.8/100, rank #195 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/modal.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/modal.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Beam for payments & pricing (+10), transparency & trust (+5).

Pick Modal for reliability (+15), schema & documentation (+12), security & auth (+18).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Beam | Modal | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 55 | 70 | Modal +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 70 | Modal +12 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 58 | 57 | Beam +1 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 50 | 68 | Modal +18 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 30 | Beam +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 85 | even |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 74 | 69 | Beam +5 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -2 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **55.5 · C** | **63.8 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Beam | Modal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | Model platform |
| Vendor | Beam | Modal |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| 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 | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Popularity | 1.8k stars, 8.5k PyPI/wk | 514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 4/5 (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.

**Modal.** Scale to zero by default, per-second billing and about one-second container boots. No REST API or OpenAPI spec for deploying or invoking Functions.

## 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

### Modal

1. Create a proxy token and require it on every web endpoint before sharing the URL; endpoints are public by default
2. Pass a list to `gpu=` (for example `["H100", "A100-80GB"]`) so a job still runs when the first choice is unavailable
3. Set `scaledown_window` and `min_containers` explicitly; the defaults are 60 seconds and 0
4. Use `.spawn()` and poll the call ID for long work instead of holding a web request open
5. Keep web endpoint traffic under 200 requests a second or ask Modal to raise the limit

## Other comparisons with Beam or Modal

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