LM Studio

LM Studio is a free desktop application — Windows, macOS, and Linux — for running open large language models on your own machine. Where tools like Ollama are terminal-first, LM Studio wraps the same idea in a friendly interface: browse a catalogue of models, click to download, and chat — no command line required.

It handles the whole local workflow: discovering and downloading models matched to your hardware, adjusting context and GPU settings, chatting with a clean interface, and exposing an OpenAI-compatible local server so your own scripts and third-party apps can use the model you are running. Everything stays on your machine — chats work with the internet unplugged.

It fits people who want local AI without touching a terminal, developers who want a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint for testing, and anyone whose priority is privacy: prompts never leave your computer. Notably, it is free for work use too — the paid commercial licence requirement was dropped in 2025.

To begin, download LM Studio from lmstudio.ai, install it, pick a model sized for your machine from the in-app catalogue, and start chatting. A 7–8 billion-parameter model is the sensible first download on a typical laptop.

The honest limits. You supply the hardware: large models need substantial RAM and a good GPU, and a modest machine is limited to smaller, less capable models. Downloads are multi-gigabyte. It is a tool for running models, not a source of intelligence itself — the ceiling is whatever open model you can fit. Individual models carry their own licences.