Weights & Biases
What it is: Developer-first platform for ML experiment tracking, visualization, and collaboration with beautiful UI and powerful features.
What It Does Best
Beautiful visualizations. Real-time charts, interactive plots, custom dashboards. Best-in-class UI for understanding experiments. Makes ML tracking actually enjoyable.
Effortless collaboration. Share experiments with teammates via URL. Comment on runs, compare models visually, build team knowledge base automatically.
Comprehensive tracking. Not just metrics - track models, datasets, code, system metrics, media (images, audio), and hyperparameters. Complete experiment lineage.
Key Features
Experiment tracking: Automatic logging with one line of code
Sweeps: Bayesian hyperparameter optimization
Artifacts: Version datasets and models with lineage
Reports: Document and share findings with rich formatting
System metrics: GPU, CPU, memory tracking automatically
Pricing
Free: Unlimited runs, 100GB storage, public projects
Team: $50/user/month (private projects, more storage)
Enterprise: Custom pricing (SSO, on-prem, SLA)
When to Use It
✅ Need beautiful experiment visualization
✅ Team collaboration on ML projects
✅ Want best-in-class UI for tracking
✅ Running many experiments to compare
✅ Hyperparameter optimization with visualization
When NOT to Use It
❌ Must self-host everything (cloud-first)
❌ Solo projects with tight budget
❌ Need full MLOps platform (ClearML more complete)
❌ Require air-gapped environment
❌ Simple tracking needs (MLflow lighter)
Common Use Cases
Deep learning research: Track and compare neural network experiments
Model comparison: Visually compare architectures and hyperparameters
Team projects: Share results and collaborate on models
Hyperparameter tuning: Run sweeps and visualize results
Progress reporting: Create reports for stakeholders
Weights & Biases vs Alternatives
vs MLflow: W&B better UI/UX, MLflow self-hostable and free
vs TensorBoard: W&B better collaboration, TensorBoard framework-specific
vs ClearML: W&B simpler, ClearML full MLOps platform
Unique Strengths
Best UI: Most polished experiment tracking interface
Collaboration-first: Designed for team workflows
Real-time updates: See metrics update during training
Rich media: Log images, audio, videos, 3D visualizations
Bottom line: Gold standard for ML experiment tracking UI and collaboration. Best choice when team needs beautiful visualizations and easy sharing. Free tier is generous. Trade-off is cloud dependency, but the experience is worth it for most teams.