Alternatives
Self-hosted alternatives to LM Studio
Projects in the registry that can run on your own hardware and serve at least one of the same use cases as LM Studio.
- Source
- Registry relations over fetched repository records — the evidence sits on each repository page
- Verified
- Evidence not verified
- Confidence
- High
01How this list was built
- Compared against
- LM Studio
- Delivery
- Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
- Shared use cases
- Local LLM, Private LLM, Document Q&A
- Selection rule
- open source, or self-hostable, and shares a use case
- Candidates found
- 27
02Alternatives
AnythingLLM
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Desktop and server application that turns a document set into a chat workspace, with per-workspace embeddings, multiple model back ends and a built-in vector store.
- Repository
- Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa · Local llm
Chroma
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Embedded and server-mode vector store with a small API surface, often used for prototypes and single-node retrieval before a larger engine is justified.
- Repository
- chroma-core/chroma
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
Continue
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Open-source IDE extension for VS Code and JetBrains that connects completion and chat to any model back end, including a local server, under a checked-in configuration file.
- Repository
- continuedev/continue
- Stars
- 35,622
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Local llm
Dify
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Platform for building LLM applications: visual workflow editor, retrieval pipelines, agent tools, prompt management and an API layer. Available self-hosted or as a managed cloud service.
- Repository
- langgenius/dify
- Stars
- 153,448
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Document qa
Docling
Libraries
Document conversion toolkit that parses PDF, Office and image files into structured Markdown or JSON, preserving reading order, tables and figures for downstream retrieval.
- Repository
- docling-project/docling
- Stars
- 65,519
- Licence
- MIT
- In stacks
- 4
Shares: Document qa
Flowise
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Visual builder for LLM chains and agents, with retrieval nodes, tool calling and an API or embeddable chat widget for the finished flow.
- Repository
- FlowiseAI/Flowise
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
Kotaemon
Self-hosted projects
Document question-answering application with a configurable retrieval pipeline, inline citations that highlight the source passage, and support for local or hosted models.
- Repository
- Cinnamon/kotaemon
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
LangChain
Frameworks
Library for composing model calls, retrieval and tools into applications, with adapters for most providers and vector stores. A building block, not a deployable product.
- Repository
- langchain-ai/langchain
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
Langflow
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Visual environment for composing LLM pipelines and agents from components, with export to a Python application or an API endpoint.
- Repository
- langflow-ai/langflow
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
LibreChat
Self-hosted projects
Self-hosted multi-model chat application with authentication, per-conversation model switching, plugins, file upload and an admin configuration file. Familiar interface for staff moving off consumer tools.
- Repository
- danny-avila/LibreChat
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Private llm · Document qa
LiteLLM
Cloud platforms
Gateway that presents one OpenAI-compatible API in front of many providers and local servers, with per-team keys, budgets, rate limits, fallbacks and request logging.
- Repository
- BerriAI/litellm
- Stars
- 57,216
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 2
Shares: Private llm · Local llm
llama.cpp
Libraries
C++ inference engine for quantised models on CPU, Apple Silicon and GPUs, with a bundled HTTP server. The engine underneath many desktop runtimes and the GGUF quantisation format.
- Repository
- ggml-org/llama.cpp
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Local llm · Private llm
LlamaIndex
Frameworks
Data framework for retrieval applications: loaders for many document types, indexing and query pipelines, and evaluation helpers for retrieval quality.
- Repository
- run-llama/llama_index
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
LocalAI
Model servers
Drop-in OpenAI-compatible API server that runs text, embedding, image and audio models locally across several back ends, including CPU-only deployments.
- Repository
- mudler/LocalAI
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Local llm · Private llm
Milvus
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Distributed vector database designed for large collections, with several index types, GPU indexing options and a separated storage and compute architecture.
- Repository
- milvus-io/milvus
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
Ollama
Model servers
Local model runtime with a one-command install, a model library and an OpenAI-compatible API. The usual starting point for running open-weight models on a workstation or small server.
- Repository
- ollama/ollama
- Stars
- 179,403
- Licence
- MIT
- In stacks
- 3
Shares: Local llm · Private llm
Onyx
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Open-source enterprise search and chat over company systems, with connectors to common SaaS tools, permission-aware indexing and a self-hosted deployment path.
- Repository
- onyx-dot-app/onyx
- Stars
- 31,754
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
Open WebUI
Self-hosted projects
Self-hosted chat interface for local and hosted models, with user accounts, groups, document upload and built-in retrieval. Runs in Docker against Ollama, vLLM or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
- Repository
- open-webui/open-webui
- Stars
- 149,870
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 4
Shares: Document qa · Private llm · Local llm
pgvector
Libraries
PostgreSQL extension adding vector types and HNSW or IVFFlat indexes, so embeddings live in the same database and the same backup as the rest of the application data.
- Repository
- pgvector/pgvector
- Stars
- 22,735
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 5
Shares: Document qa
PostgreSQL
Self-hosted projects
Relational database used here as the system of record for documents, metadata and job queues, and — with pgvector — for embeddings as well.
- Repository
- none linked
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 3
Shares: Document qa
Qdrant
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Vector search engine written in Rust with payload filtering, hybrid search, quantisation and snapshots. Runs as a single container or a cluster, or as a managed cloud service.
- Repository
- qdrant/qdrant
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa · Private llm
RAGFlow
Self-hosted projects
Retrieval engine built around deep document parsing: layout-aware chunking of PDFs, tables and scans, citation-backed answers, and a visual pipeline for building knowledge bases.
- Repository
- infiniflow/ragflow
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Document qa
SGLang
Model servers
Serving framework for large models with prefix caching and structured-output support, aimed at high-throughput deployments and multi-GPU serving.
- Repository
- sgl-project/sglang
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Local llm · Private llm
Tabby
Self-hosted projects
Self-hosted coding assistant with its own inference server, repository-aware context and IDE extensions. Runs entirely inside the network, including on a single GPU.
- Repository
- TabbyML/tabby
- Stars
- 33,834
- Licence
- Other
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Local llm
Unstructured
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Library and hosted API that partition documents of many formats into typed elements for indexing, with connectors to common storage systems and vector databases.
- Repository
- Unstructured-IO/unstructured
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 1
Shares: Document qa
vLLM
Model servers
High-throughput GPU inference server using paged attention and continuous batching, with an OpenAI-compatible API. Built for many concurrent users rather than single-session use.
- Repository
- vllm-project/vllm
- Stars
- 89,956
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- In stacks
- 7
Shares: Local llm · Private llm
Weaviate
Hybrid — hosted or self-hosted
Vector database with a schema model, hybrid keyword and vector search, and optional built-in vectorisation modules. Self-hosted or managed, single-tenant or multi-tenant collections.
- Repository
- weaviate/weaviate
- Stars
- —
- Licence
- unknown
- In stacks
- 0
Shares: Document qa
03Repository facts
| Repository | Stars | Health |
|---|---|---|
| Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| chroma-core/chroma | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| continuedev/continueopen-source coding agent | 36k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 60%, Contributors 50%, Issues 74%, Community 91%80 |
| langgenius/difyBuild Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, with rich AI model and tool support on one collaborative workspace. Deploy on cloud, VPC, or self-hosted, so teams move from prototype to production without rebuilding the stack. | 153k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 80%, Contributors 50%, Issues 94%, Community 100%88 |
| docling-project/doclingGet your documents ready for gen AI | 66k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 85%, Community 96%90 |
| FlowiseAI/Flowise | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| Cinnamon/kotaemon | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| langchain-ai/langchain | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| langflow-ai/langflow | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| danny-avila/LibreChat | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| BerriAI/litellmThe fastest, litest AI Gateway. Rust core with Python SDK. Call 100+ LLM APIs in OpenAI (or native) format with cost tracking, guardrails, load balancing, and logging [Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, VertexAI, vLLM, Nvidia NIM] | 57k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 14%, Community 95%83 |
| ggml-org/llama.cpp | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| run-llama/llama_index | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| mudler/LocalAI | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| milvus-io/milvus | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| ollama/ollamaGet up and running with Kimi-K2.6, GLM-5.2, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models. | 179k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 79%, Community 100%90 |
| onyx-dot-app/onyxOpen Source AI Platform - AI Chat with advanced features that works with every LLM | 32k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 100%, Contributors 50%, Issues 87%, Community 90%89 |
| open-webui/open-webuiUser-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, ...) | 150k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 80%, Contributors 50%, Issues 99%, Community 100%88 |
| pgvector/pgvectorOpen-source vector similarity search for Postgres | 23k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 30%, Contributors 50%, Issues 99%, Community 87%75 |
| qdrant/qdrant | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| infiniflow/ragflow | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| sgl-project/sglang | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| TabbyML/tabbySelf-hosted AI coding assistant | 34k | Maintenance 60%, Releases 20%, Contributors 50%, Issues 90%, Community 91%61 |
| Unstructured-IO/unstructured | — | Health not measuredunknown |
| vllm-project/vllmA high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs | 90k | Maintenance 100%, Releases 80%, Contributors 50%, Issues 22%, Community 99%81 |
| weaviate/weaviate | — | Health not measuredunknown |
04Ask about your own case
Which alternative is right depends on how many people will use it, what the data is and what you can operate. Ask and the answer is researched for your organisation.