Comparing CoCalc to other products
Disclaimer
Any comparison on this page was made in good faith. They might contain errors or bias.
Please report any inaccuracies!
Online Jupyter Notebooks – learn more
| CoCalc | MyBinder | Colab | Azure | Datalore | DeepNote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% compatible | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? | ? |
| Programming languages | Python, Sage, R, Octave, and many more | Python, R, etc. and customizable | Python 3 | ? | Python 3 | Python 3, and ? |
| IPython Widgets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | ? |
| Collaboration 1 | Yes | No | ? | ? | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time sync 2 | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Persistence | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Full environment | Linux, ~9,500 packages | Limited | No | ? | ? | Linux, ~350 packages |
| Access | Free | Free | Free | Limited | Free | private beta |
| Data storage | 3 GB | No | ? | ? | ? | Yes |
| One-click run | Yes | Yes | ? | ? | ? | No |
| Publishing 5 | Yes | No | ? | ? | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Open-source | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| GPU | No9 | No | Yes | ? | No | Limited |
Online LaTeX Editor – learn more
| CoCalc | Overleaf/Sharelatex | Authorea | Papeeria | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time sync 2 | Yes | Limited4 | No | ? | |
| PdfLaTeX | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
| XeLaTeX | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
| LuaTeX | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
| Upload files | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Forward/Inverse search 6 | Yes | Yes | N/A | No | |
| Multi-file support | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | |
| WYSIWYG | No | not really | Yes | No | |
| Equation editor | No | No | Yes | No | |
| Bibliography | Limited | Yes | Yes | Limited | |
| Journal Templates | No | Yes | Yes | No | |
| External tools 3 | Yes | Limited | No | No | |
| R/Knitr | Yes | Limited7 | No | No | |
| SageTeX | Yes | No | No | No | |
| PythonTeX | Yes | No | No | No | |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Online Linux Terminal – learn more
| CoCalc | GCE/AWS/Azure | LXD.org | Webminal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Full Linux | Yes | Yes | Yes | ? |
| Packages 8 | ~9,500 | custom | ~200 | ~700 |
| Copy/paste | Yes | ? | ? | Limited |
| Backups | Yes | No | No | No |
| Persistence | Yes | N/A | No | ? |
| Setup | Easy | Hard | Easy | Easy |
| Root access | No | Yes | Yes | Limited |
Footnotes
- Collaboration: Files are private, but can be shared with one or more other registered users on that platform
- Real-time sync: Multiple users can edit the same file. While anyone types, each other collaborator sees the changes at the same time.
- External tools: access to a full software environment, e.g. able to run arbitrary python scripts or notebooks – also as part of the compilation (
-shell-escapemode) - Maximum number of collaborators: Depending on the plan, Overleaf supports only 1, 10 or unlimited collaborators. Plans&Pricing, 2020-03-12
Publishing: The content of the file can be made publicly available on the internet.- Forward/Inverse search: Jump from the cursor position to the page/position in the PDF preview and vice versa, jump from the page/position in the PDF to the cursor position in the
.texsource. - Overleaf R/Knitr support: Only about 300 packages (CoCalc hosts more than 10x as many!), not possible to install additional R packages, only one syntax style, no Jupyter Notebooks, no caching of Knitr results between runs (i.e. much slower), ...
- Linux packages: collected by running e.g.
apt list --installed | wc -lorrpm -qa | wc -l - GPU for CoCalc: You could run cocalc-docker on your own hardware with a GPU!
