Google Colab

Google Colab (Colaboratory) is a hosted Jupyter notebook environment that runs in the browser, developed by Google Research and made publicly available in 2017. It lets you write and run code (primarily Python, and also R and Julia) with zero setup — everything runs on Google's machines in the cloud.

Colab offers free (rate-limited) access to GPU and TPU accelerators, which makes it popular for machine learning, data analysis, research and education. Notebooks are stored in Google Drive and support real-time collaboration (like Google Docs). The platform integrates with Google Drive, GitHub, BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage, and with popular ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn).

Colab provides Gemini-powered AI features — a coding assistant and a Data Science Agent. Its business model is freemium: alongside the free tier there are paid plans (Pay As You Go with compute units, Colab Pro, Pro+) and an Enterprise option (Colab Enterprise) within Google Cloud, offering more powerful, longer-available hardware (including T4, L4, A100 GPUs and TPUs).