# Beam vs Vast.ai (slim)

> Vast.ai scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Beam's 55.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Beam leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do compute gpu. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-vast-ai.md (~2,100 tokens) · this version ~630 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-vast-ai.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/beam-vs-vast-ai
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-08

Vast.ai scores 62.6 (B) on agent readiness against Beam's 55.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Beam leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do compute gpu.

- Beam: C 55.5, rank #507 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/beam.min.md
- Vast.ai: B 62.6, rank #331 of 722 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/vast-ai.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 Payments & pricing, 40 against 20; Transparency & trust, 74 against 62. Also Open source.
- Vast.ai, good for Cost-sensitive training, batch work and self-managed inference where the agent can search listings, set a price cap and tolerate host variance or interruption. Ahead on Reliability, 65 against 55; Schema & documentation, 78 against 58; Security & auth, 72 against 50.

| Category | Beam | Vast.ai |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 55 | 65 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 58 | 78 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 58 | 57 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 50 | 72 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 81 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 74 | 62 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Beam | Vast.ai |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Beam | Vast.ai Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://app.beam.cloud/api/v1` | `https://console.vast.ai/api/v0` |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary service under Vast.ai's Terms of Use Agreement. The `vastai` CLI and Python SDK on GitHub are MIT |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-02 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-14 | 2025-06-18 |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | yes |
| 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 | 223 stars, 33k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | none |