Ollama

Ollama is the dominant local LLM runtime with 52+ million monthly downloads as of Q1 2026. It wraps llama.cpp with a single-command interface for model management and provides an OpenAI-compatible REST API on port 11434 out of the box. Run `ollama pull llama4` and you have a local model running in seconds. It handles quantization selection, GPU offloading, and model management automatically. Supports GGUF, Safetensors, and custom Modelfiles for fine-tuned configurations. With GPU acceleration, it delivers 300+ tokens/second on consumer hardware and up to 1,200 tokens/second on high-end setups. Multimodal models (vision + text), web search integration, and optimized 4-bit quantization are all supported. For any developer who wants to run AI models locally with zero friction, Ollama is the starting point.