Google Colab
Hacker ApprovedRanked 4 of 7 computational notebooks by recommenders
Free GPU and TPU access in a hosted Jupyter notebook, handy for quick experiments and data science work. Common caveat: sessions can disconnect and setup can be slow.
Free GPU and TPU access in a hosted Jupyter notebook, handy for quick experiments and data science work. Common caveat: sessions can disconnect and setup can be slow.
25 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 18
- criticize it
- 7
- approval share
- 72%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 18 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Free GPU and TPU access
“You can test the whole thing for free on a GPU with Google Colab”
Comment from 30 Sep 2026 in “PSSA: A non-transformer language model written from scratch in Rust” “you can actually do that with free Google Colab instances”
Comment from 14 Jun 2026 in “AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke” “use the free Kaggle/Google Cola T4s/TPUs to get started”
Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “Why isn't AMD's MI300X competitive?” - Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Google Colab Is Coming to VS Code”
Cheap paid plans for training
“Overall, it cost me <$2 using Colab's pay as you go plan to train the model, which was surprisingly less than I expected.”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Show HN: LLM post-training to speak like GenZ, costing less than a cup of coffee” “their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook”
Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “GLM-5.3-Flash” “They give you 200 cloud compute units on google collab”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “Ember-1” Google Drive integration
“Google Collab has access to Google Drive so you can write some nifty Python scripts”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?” “I have some Google Collab notebooks where I download/upload the videos”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you turn videos into searchable text without uploading them?” Good for reproducible experiments
“I really like Colab as a platform for little reproducible experiments”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber” “seems rather spiffy for data science”
Comment from 25 Nov 2025 in “Using Antigravity for Statistical Physics in JavaScript”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Unreliable connections and service problems
“Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak.”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub” “Colab takes too long to setup and then kicks us off”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Flow Where You Want – Guidance for Flow Models” Weak model and agent support
“A cursory glance reveals it has limited model support.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Google Colab Is Coming to VS Code” “colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”
Other computational notebooks people recommend
The four most recommended other computational notebooks, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jupyter Notebook | 67 | 39 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| marimo | 53 | 7 | 88% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Pluto.jl | 21 | 0 | 100% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Google ColabThis page | 18 | 7 | 72% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Deepnote | 12 | 16 | 43% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
23 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Google Colab let's you just do it”
“I have some Google Collab notebooks where I download/upload the videos”
“You can test the whole thing for free on a GPU with Google Colab”
“They give you 200 cloud compute units on google collab”
“I really like Colab as a platform for little reproducible experiments”
“their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook”
“Google Collab has access to Google Drive so you can write some nifty Python scripts”
“you can actually do that with free Google Colab instances”
“Overall, it cost me <$2 using Colab's pay as you go plan to train the model, which was surprisingly less than I expected.”
“use the free Kaggle/Google Cola T4s/TPUs to get started”
“Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak.”
“really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription”
“I also built a 1-Click Google Colab Sandbox (linked in the repo)”
“Colab UI is now in Spanish (using technical terms that make no sense).”
“Colab takes too long to setup and then kicks us off”
“access to software and services, educational packages from GitHub, Wolfram, Google Colab Pro, student discount in a bunch of places”
“seems rather spiffy for data science”
“Colab is still going strong.”
“A cursory glance reveals it has limited model support.”
“colab/data science agent are all bad experiences.”
“it gives you access to GPUs, and TPUs for free”
“Google Colab is slightly better”
“ironically that makes jupyter more portable via colab”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.