Ollama

Open source · OSI-approvedStatus: unknown

Run open language models locally with one command

Ollama reduced local model hosting from an afternoon of CUDA troubleshooting to a single pull command. It handles model download, quantisation selection, GPU offloading, and memory management, and exposes an OpenAI-compatible endpoint on localhost.

That endpoint is the real product. Any tool already written against the OpenAI API can be pointed at a local model by changing a base URL, which is why Ollama became the default local backend for a large amount of other software.

Decisive facts

One command model pulls with automatic quantisation selection
OpenAI-compatible HTTP API on localhost
Metal, CUDA, and ROCm acceleration handled automatically
Modelfiles for pinning system prompts and parameters
Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows with the same interface

LLM Runtimes & Chat Developer Tools go llm local-ai privacy inference

Alternatives to Ollama

LM Studio

Desktop application for running language models locally

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