Is Weights & Biases free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Free for personal and academic use with generous limits. Team plans are per-seat, commonly around $50 per user per month on the standard tier, plus storage and tracked-hour charges above the included allowance. Enterprise and self-hosted deployments are negotiated separately and are substantially more.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if the collaboration surface is doing real work — W&B Reports are genuinely good at turning a training run into something a non-ML stakeholder can read, and no open alternative matches that. Stay for large-scale distributed sweeps, where the hosted orchestration is mature and reproducing it is a project. Stay while your team is small enough that per-seat pricing is not the dominant line, and while nobody wants to own a tracking server and its storage. The alternatives below assume you can run a service and a database.
What you are locked into
Moderate. New logging code is a small change — the APIs are similar enough across these tools that swapping is largely mechanical, and MLflow can ingest a good deal of history. The sticky part is accumulated run history and stored artefacts, which is the whole reason the tool exists. Export before you cancel, and be aware that pulling large artefact stores out takes longer than the migration itself.
If you would rather not pay: MLflow
MLflow
The open standard. Tracking, registry, projects and deployment in one.
Free, Apache-2.0. Managed versions are sold by the clouds if you want one.
See all 5 Weights & Biases alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Weights & Biases before you commit. More experiment tracking & ml ops decisions on Macrostack.