Open-source alternatives / OpenAI API
Ollama — free open-source OpenAI API alternative
182,067 GitHub stars
Get up and running with Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models.
Replaces: OpenAI API — the paid alternative. Ollama does the same job and the licence is $0: you pay only for the server it runs on.
Why teams switch to Ollama
- $0 licence. The paid tool charges per seat every month. Ollama is free forever, including commercial use under its open-source licence.
- Your data stays yours. Ollama is self-hosted — it runs on your own server, so no third party holds your records.
- Proven at scale. 182,067 GitHub stars and an active contributor base mean real companies run this in production, not just hobbyists.
Trade-off, honestly: open-source means you (or an IT person) install and maintain it. If nobody on your team can run a server, the paid alternative may still be the right call — that is what it is charging for.