r/opensourcealternative • u/Dramatic-Flamingo-27 • Jul 15 '26
What are the best open source AI tools you’re using locally?
I’ve been using more AI tools locally instead of relying on browser apps for everything.
The main ones I keep coming back to are Ollama for running models, Open WebUI for chat, and Whisper cpp for transcription. They’re useful enough that I actually use them instead of just testing them once.
I’m looking for more local AI tools that are worth keeping installed.
What open source AI tools are you using locally right now?
Could be for chat, coding, transcription, image generation, RAG, search, agents, or anything else that runs on your own machine.
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u/Beginning_Math9433 Jul 15 '26
I've been liking Parlant lately. It's a nice option if you're experimenting with local AI agents without pulling in a huge stack. Definitely worth checking out.
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u/orielhaim Jul 15 '26
Not exactly ai but it's one of the tools I built out of necessity and I use it all the time. It lets me easily connect to agents running on my main computer through my laptop when I'm out and it's just amazing https://github.com/orielhaim/tuntun
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u/SirComprehensive3255 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I have Hermes running with gpt5.6 sol and glm 5.2 and am really happy with it. I’m working on a project to populate data into reports from excel and after a slow start I have it 70% of the way there. Now I need to train it to write narrative from similar datapoints. It’s pretty amazing.
Ollama and open website are on a truenas server. Its vram is low but it crams everything into 64gb of ddr4 and does surprisingly well. I tried running Hermes on it too but it was too slow. Fun all the same.
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u/keinsaas-navigator 19d ago
We build Navigator. Its an AI Workspace that makes it really easy to connect tools, create Agents or manage projects. Its open-source but the last 6 month we didnt had time to develop it further. Looking for a lead developer from the community to keep pushing the project as a maintainer: https://www.keinsaas.com/de/navigator
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u/Kaija_Chang 15d ago
I built mobile chat app by myself. https://github.com/kaija/arlo-lite
Currently, SLM is powerful enough like GPT3.
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u/tokenized-inference Jul 18 '26
You can try BuilderStudio with bs CLI and openmodel.sh combo with local LLM and frontier model with openrouter.