Tools
LM Studio vs LocalAI
LM Studio or LocalAI? Their plans monthly and yearly, the capabilities their makers state, security and latest updates, side by side — read from the makers' own pages.
In short
- Both: Command line, Choice of models, Self-hosted, API, Runs models for you, Search over your data
- Only LM Studio states: No code retained, Official SDKs
- Only LocalAI states: Runs commands, VS Code, Builds agents and workflows
LM Studio
Runs open language models locally on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with chat, a programmable API, and optional cloud inference.
Plans
Free
Free
- Run local LLMs on your machine
- Bionic Agent
- Run local LLMs using llama.cpp and MLX
- State-of-the-art offline voice transcription
- LM Link for up to 5 devices
- Limited web search
Bionic+
- $ 20 USD / month
- US-hosted open source models: Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and more
- Discounted bulk tokens
- Web search and page extraction
Pro
- $ 100 USD / month
- 5× usage limits
- Discounted bulk tokens
- Early access to new features
Prices checked 2026-09-25 on the maker’s page.
Capabilities
- Command line — “LM Studio CLI (lms)” source
- Choice of models — “Download the latest local LLMs directly within the app and use them for simple chats or advanced agentic tasks.” source
- Self-hosted — “llmster is LM Studio's headless daemon for servers, cloud instances, and CI.” source
- No code retained — “Zero data retention means your prompts and responses are not stored by the provider.” source
- API — “Experiment with LLMs on your computer. Chat interface and programmable API.” source
- Official SDKs — “lmstudio-js lmstudio-python” source
- Runs models for you — “Bionic cloud inference is US-hosted, with Zero data retention (ZDR)” source
- Search over your data — “Fixed a bug where RAG document retrieval could fail with some llama.cpp models” source
Latest updates
- Bionic 1.1.6 (1.1.6)
Canvas: board that both you and Bionic can edit; Markdown and source files in the in-app editor.
- Bionic 1.1.5 (1.1.5)
Qwen3.8 inference using a new engine: Splash (by Inco AI); prompt-processing status for models without percentage progress.
- Bionic 1.1.4 (1.1.4)
Introspection: agent can read messages earlier in its own history; supports @ referencing other sessions; tool-call argument streaming.
LocalAI
LocalAI runs AI models on your own hardware through an OpenAI-compatible local server and web interface.
Plans
Not read from the maker’s page yet.
Prices checked 2026-09-25 on the maker’s page.
Capabilities
- Runs commands — “It runs shell commands behind an approval gate you control, delegates to sub-agents, and loads MCP servers, plugins and skills.” source
- VS Code — “Install on openSUSE and drive it from VS Code” source
- Command line — “Run local-ai chat and you are talking to an agent that already knows where your models are.” source
- Choice of models — “Every tier of every model we quantize, ranked against the hardware you actually have and installed with one click.” source
- Self-hosted — “keep your data on your hardware, and scale to a room full of GPUs when you need more capacity.” source
- API — “One binary with an OpenAI-compatible API in front of it.” source
- Runs models for you — “Point an existing client at it and the calls keep working, except now the model is on your machine.” source
- Builds agents and workflows — “Run local-ai chat and you are talking to an agent that already knows where your models are.” source
- Search over your data — “Agents, MCP, skills, RAG, interactive tools” source
Latest updates
- v4.10.0 (v4.10.0)
Added a fleet operations dashboard, credentials.yaml authentication, and CLI end-to-end latency and throughput benchmarking.
- v4.9.0 (v4.9.0)
Authentication now defaults to deny; chat supports context compression, canonical model/backend pages, and video serving in vllm-cpp.
- v4.8.0 (v4.8.0)
Added the vllm-cpp backend, 3D generation, a multi-family audio.cpp engine, hardware-matched gallery builds, and distributed-mode fixes.