What is the easiest way to run a local LLM?

LM Studio (GUI) for non-technical use, or Ollama (one command) for developers. Both run a model locally in minutes. vLLM is for high-throughput production serving, not casual use.

What should I use in production?

vLLM (or TGI) — they deliver far higher throughput and concurrency via paged attention and batching. Ollama and LM Studio are great for development and single-user use but not high-load serving.

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GUIDESOFTWARE

The local LLM software stack: Ollama vs LM Studio vs vLLM

Evergreen guide · updated 2026

Key takeaway

Pick by role: LM Studio for a no-code desktop GUI, Ollama for developers who want one-command models and a local API, and vLLM (or TGI) for high-throughput production serving. Many teams prototype on Ollama and deploy on vLLM.

Running a local LLM is no longer hard — the question is which tool fits your role. The three that matter cover a spectrum from "double-click and chat" to "serve thousands of requests per second."

The three tools

	Best for	Interface
LM Studio	Beginners, no-code	Desktop GUI
Ollama	Developers, local apps	CLI + REST API
vLLM	Production, high load	Server / OpenAI-compatible API

How to choose

Non-technical or just exploring: LM Studio. Building an app or want a local API on your machine: Ollama. Serving many concurrent users or maximizing GPU throughput: vLLM or TGI. The common path is Ollama for dev → vLLM for production.

Continue exploring