A free desktop app with a graphical interface for discovering, downloading, and chatting with local models, and serving them via a local API — a GUI-first alternative to command-line tools.
LM Studio is a point-and-click desktop application (macOS, Windows, Linux) for running open models on your own computer. It has a built-in model browser tied to Hugging Face, downloads GGUF files for you, and gives you a chat UI plus knobs for quantization choice, context length, and GPU offload.
It also exposes a local server with an OpenAI-compatible API, so you can point existing apps and code at your local model instead of a paid cloud endpoint. Like the others, it uses llama.cpp under the hood for inference.
LM Studio is aimed at people who prefer a visual app over the terminal. It's another "run locally" path Spanvero points to when your own machine is the cheapest way to run a given model.
Ollama · llama.cpp · GGUF · Local vs API vs renting a GPU
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