LocalAI

The Swiss Army knife of local AI inference. LocalAI doesn't just run LLMs — it handles image generation, audio processing, embeddings, and more through a single OpenAI-compatible API. If you're migrating off cloud AI services and need a drop-in replacement that speaks the same protocol, this is it.

Ollama is the simpler, faster choice for just running LLMs — 15-20% faster inference and dead-simple CLI. LM Studio gives you a desktop GUI. vLLM is the production-grade option for GPU-heavy deployments.

Where LocalAI shines is flexibility. It supports GGUF, Safetensors, GPTQ, AWQ — basically every model format. It runs on CPU without a GPU, which Ollama also does but with fewer model types. The multi-modal support means one service replaces three or four specialized tools.

The catch: that flexibility comes with complexity. Setup is harder than Ollama's one-liner. Performance lags behind dedicated tools for any single task. And with Ollama hitting 52 million monthly downloads in Q1 2026, the ecosystem gravity is pulling developers the other way.