# Beam vs Thunder Compute (slim)

> Thunder Compute and Beam score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 56.1 (C) and 55.5 (C). Beam leads on agent ergonomics, payments & pricing, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do compute gpu. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side…

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-thunder-compute.md (~2,500 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-thunder-compute.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-thunder-compute
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Thunder Compute and Beam score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 56.1 (C) and 55.5 (C). Beam leads on agent ergonomics, payments & pricing, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do compute gpu.

- Beam: C 55.5, rank #588 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/beam.min.md
- Thunder Compute: C 56.1, rank #576 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/thunder-compute.min.md
- Beam, good for Cost-sensitive Python teams running bursty GPU functions on consumer or PCIe cards, and anyone who wants the option to self-host the same runtime. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 58 against 48; Payments & pricing, 40 against 20; Maintenance & community, 85 against 79; Transparency & trust, 74 against 64. Also Open source.
- Thunder Compute, good for Agents in coding tools that rent a single persistent GPU machine for development, fine-tuning or a model server, at low hourly prices and over MCP. Ahead on Reliability, 65 against 55; Schema & documentation, 70 against 58.

| Category | Beam | Thunder Compute |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 55 | 65 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 58 | 70 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 58 | 48 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 50 | 51 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 79 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 74 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Beam | Thunder Compute |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Beam | Thunder Compute |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` | `https://api.thundercompute.com:8443/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for compute gpu | not published | $0.219 per GB per month |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary service under Thunder Compute's Terms and Conditions. The `tnr` CLI on GitHub is MIT |
| Tools exposed | none | 28 |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.Thunder-Compute/thunder-compute` |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-16 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-28 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-28 |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 1.8k stars, 8.5k PyPI/wk | 34 stars |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | none |