LM Studio Free
Desktop app to discover, download and chat with local models
What is LM Studio?
LM Studio is a polished desktop app for running open models locally on Mac, Windows and Linux, with a chat interface, document chat, a local server and support for GGUF and MLX formats.
Pros
- Friendly GUI for local models
- Runs a local OpenAI-style server
- Free for personal use
Cons
- Needs plenty of RAM
- Commercial use requires a licence
LM Studio pricing
Free. Prices change often, so confirm on the official pricing page.
Best LM Studio alternatives
All alternatives →OpenAI API Paid
GPT, reasoning, image, audio and realtime models with the Responses API
Claude API Paid
Anthropic's Claude models for coding, agents and long documents
Hugging Face Freemium
The home of open models, datasets and Spaces demos
Google AI Studio Freemium
Prototype with Gemini for free, then ship with the Gemini API
Ollama Open source
Run Llama, Gemma, DeepSeek and more locally with one command
OpenRouter Paid
One API key for hundreds of models from every provider
Compare LM Studio
Verdict
LM Studio scores 8.2/10 in our llm apis & developer platforms ranking. It is a solid choice, though the alternatives above are worth a look.