Key Concepts

The Local Platform lets you run backtests, deploy research notebooks, and deploy live algorithms on your local machine and in QuantConnect Cloud. This is the best of both environments, letting you use your local hardware or our scalable cloud systems.

The Local Platform syncs your local and cloud project files. If you pull your cloud projects to your local machine, you can use your own version control systems to track project changes.

The Local Platform offers you the ability to take ownership of your project security. On the Institution tier, you can create local projects without pushing them to QuantConnect Cloud.

With the Local Platform, you can use custom images of the LEAN to add extensions or fixes at your convenience, and then run these images with the Local Platform interface.

Out of the box, the Local Platform enables you to run backtests, optimizations, research notebooks, and deploy live algorithms on a local computer or single server.

Build your own private cloud cluster on private hardware or clouds. The Private Cloud add-on allows scaling the Local Platform to serve multiple engineers on thin clients, like laptops, with powerful work servers that can be loaded with GPUs and centralized copies of proprietary data. The Private Cloud is a much more efficient local-cloud setup and can easily scale to large teams.

The following table shows the coding features of each platform:

Feature	Platform
	Local Platform	Cloud Platform
Development Environment The tool you can use to edit project files	Any IDE	Cloud-hosted VS Code
Version Control Track file changes over time and easily revert mistakes	Your own git systems	Access historical project files through your backtest results
Anonymous Projects Create and edit local projects without syncing to QuantConnect Cloud	Self-sovereign security	Managed by QuantConnect
Custom LEAN Versions Build and run custom versions of LEAN
Autocomplete Easy-to-use tool to speed up your development

The following table shows the backtesting and optimization features of each platform:

Feature	Platform
	Local Platform	Cloud Platform
Data Source Where does the data come from?	Licensed data	Provided by QuantConnect
Data Maintenance Who ensures the data is clean and ready?	Self-maintaned	QuantConnect Team
Compute Where is the hardware that runs backtests?	Your compute	QuantConnect Cloud compute
Proprietary Data Data that's not in the Dataset Market	Never leaves premise	Upload to cloud
Debugging Easy-to-use tool for solving coding errors

The following table shows the parameter optimization features of each platform:

Feature	Platform
	Local Platform	Cloud Platform
Data Source Where does the data come from?	Licensed data	Provided by QuantConnect
Stability How stable is your live trading environment?	Your local setup	Stable co-located environment
Notifications SMS, email, Telegram, and webhooks