LM Studio
A desktop app for finding, downloading and chatting with local language models. Free, closed source, and the gentlest way in.
- Self-hosted
- Active
- Allowed adult content
- Free
At a glance
- Where it runs
- Self-hostedYou run it on your own machine. Nothing leaves it unless you send it.
- Adult content
- AllowedAdult content is permitted within the published rules.
- Trains on your content
- NoYour content is not used to train models.
- Status
- ActiveMaintained and working today.
- Account needed
- No
- Licence
- Proprietary (free)
- Cost
- Free for personal use; commercial use has separate terms.
- What it keeps
- Conversations are stored locally. The publisher states chats are not collected.
What it takes to run
- Graphics memory
- No GPU needed
- System memory
- 8 GB, 16 GB recommended
- Disk
- about 20 GB
- Runs on
- Linux, macOS, Windows
Find what fits your machine on the tools page — pick your hardware from the first menu.
Search Hugging Face from inside the app, see at a glance which quantisations will fit your machine, download one, and start talking. For someone who wants a private chatbot on their laptop and does not want a project, this is the shortest path.
It also runs a local OpenAI-compatible server, so it can be the engine behind other software in this catalog.
It is free but not open source, so its privacy behaviour is a matter of trusting the publisher rather than reading the code.
Worth knowing before you start
- Closed source You cannot audit what it does with your conversations.
- Commercial use is restricted Personal use is free; business use needs their permission.
What it does
- Model browser with fit estimates
- Local OpenAI-compatible server
- Chat interface
- Runs on CPU
Models it runs
How it relates to other tools
Signs of life
Checked automatically. These are the only figures on this page a machine wrote, and they say when they were taken.
- Last answered
- Yes, 3 hours ago Its website responded when we asked.
- Archived copy
- Wayback Machine A snapshot, in case this one stops answering.
Categories
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