Google Colab, Joute's review

The essentials in 20 seconds

• Jupyter notebooks hosted in Google's cloud, running on Google servers
• Free access to T4 GPUs (time-limited) for machine learning
• Google Drive integration to save and share notebooks
• Pricing: free with limits, Colab Pro at $10/month for more resources

Verdict: Google Colab is the reference tool for doing machine learning without your own infrastructure. Free, GPU-powered, and collaborative. The free plan covers most experimental needs.

What is Google Colab

Google Colab is a Google service that lets you run Jupyter notebooks in the cloud. Each notebook is linked to a runtime with CPU and optionally GPU. You code in Python through a web interface, and notebooks are saved in Google Drive.

Main audience: data scientists, ML researchers, and students who need a GPU without hardware investment.

Strengths

Free GPU (T4)

The free plan gives access to NVIDIA T4 GPUs for limited sessions. For training lightweight models or fine-tuning open source models, it's enough.

Zero configuration

You open your browser and start coding. No Conda, no CUDA to install, no dependencies to manage. Popular ML libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) are pre-installed.

Easy sharing

A Colab notebook shares like a Google Doc. Collaborating on ML code is as simple as sharing a link.

Limits

Sessions that stop

The free runtime stops after 12h or on inactivity. Notebooks can lose their state. You need to save regularly.

GPU not guaranteed

On the free plan, GPU access can be limited during high-demand periods. Colab Pro guarantees better availability.

Pricing

• Free: limited GPU, sessions up to 12h max
• Colab Pro: $10/month (more GPU, longer sessions)
• Colab Pro+: $50/month (premium GPU, background sessions)

Alternatives

• Kaggle for free notebooks with GPU, competition-oriented
• Deepnote for more advanced collaborative notebooks
• Marimo for reactive open source Python notebooks locally

Verdict

Google Colab is a must for getting started in ML or running experiments without an infrastructure budget. The free plan covers 80% of needs. Colab Pro is worth $10/month if you regularly work on models that need several hours of GPU time.

FAQ

Does Colab support R notebooks?

Yes, R is supported in addition to Python.

Can you install custom Python packages?

Yes. !pip install package works in cells. Installations last for the duration of the session.

Does Colab keep files between sessions?

Files in /content are lost at the end of the session. What's in Google Drive persists.

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