# Lambda Cloud vs Modal

> Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) 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

Modal has a score of 63.8 (B) against Lambda Cloud's 50.1 (D). Both do compute gpu. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 80 points.

- 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
- 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 Lambda Cloud for agent ergonomics (+6).

Pick Modal for reliability (+20), security & auth (+8), payments & pricing (+10), maintenance & community (+80), transparency & trust (+10).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Lambda Cloud | Modal | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 50 | 70 | Modal +20 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 69 | 70 | Modal +1 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 63 | 57 | Lambda Cloud +6 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 60 | 68 | Modal +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 30 | Modal +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 5 | 85 | Modal +80 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 59 | 69 | Modal +10 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **50.1 · D** | **63.8 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Lambda Cloud | Modal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Lambda | Modal |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://cloud.lambda.ai/api/v1` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | 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 | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | none | 2026-09-28 |
| Popularity | none | 514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 4/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**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.

**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

### 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

### 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

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- [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)
- [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)