Edge Impulse vs Lightning LitServe

Edge Impulse

Edge Impulse is a platform focused on deploying ML models to low-power edge devices and embedded systems. It supports both vision and other models like audio, time-series, and signal processing. Edge Impulse is uniquely good at working withmicrocontrollers and has SDKs for single-board computers and mobile devices.

The design focus on TinyML makes it less suited for high-resource, general-purpose tasks like video processing and running modern, state-of-the-art ML models. It also requires some familiarity with embedded systems. It typically requires custom coding your application logic to run on the embedded board.

Chose Edge Impulse if: you're working on an IoT or wearable device that's not capable of running more powerful models, framework, and logic.

Lightning LitServe

LitServe is a lightweight and customizable inference server focused on serving models with minimal overhead. It is fairly minimalistic but flexible and self-contained.

Like Triton, LitServe is task-agnostic, meaning it is designed to balance the needs of vision models with NLP, audio, and tabular models. This means it's not as feature-rich for computer vision applications (for example, it doesn't have any built-in features for streaming video). It is also highly focused on model serving without an abstraction layer like Workflows (offered by Roboflow Inference) for model chaining and integrations with other tools.

Choose LitServe if: you are working on general-purpose machine learningtasks and were previously considering rolling your own server but wanta more featureful starting point.

Make any camera an AI camera with Inference

Inference turns any computer or edge device into a command center for your computer vision projects.

  • 🛠️ Self-host your own fine-tuned models
  • 🧠 Access the latest and greatest foundation models (like Florence-2, CLIP, and SAM2)
  • 🤝 Use Workflows to track, count, time, measure, and visualize
  • 👁️ Combine ML with traditional CV methods (like OCR, Barcode Reading, QR, and template matching)
  • 📈 Monitor, record, and analyze predictions
  • 🎥 Manage cameras and video streams
  • 📬 Send notifications when events happen
  • 🛜 Connect with external systems and APIs
  • 🔗 Extend with your own code and models
  • 🚀 Deploy production systems at scale

Get started today.

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