AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones
Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones. Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building AI apps and agents capable of phone use without breaking privacy, supports real-time inference with no latency, we have seen personalised RAG pipelines for users and more. Apple and Google actively went into local AI models recently with the launch of Apple Foundation Frameworks…
Cactus is a cross-platform framework that lets developers run large language models, vision models, embedding models, and text-to-speech directly on smartphones. It works with Flutter, React Native, and Kotlin… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
1Code▲569Just to clarify the background a bit. This project wasn’t planned as a big standalone release at first. On January 16, Ollama added support for an Anthropic-compatible API, and I was curious how far this could be pushed in practice. I decided to try plugging local Ollama models directly into a Claude Code-style workflow and see if it would actually work end to end. Here is the release note from Ollama that made this possible: https://ollama.com/blog/claude Technically, what I do is pretty straightforward: - Detect which local models are available in Ollama. - When…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Ollama v0.19▲410Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX
Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
- 3
- 4
Hi Hackers, Excited to share a macOS app I've been working on: https://recurse.chat/ for chatting with local AI. While it's amazing that you can run AI models locally quite easily these days (through llama.cpp / llamafile / ollama / llm CLI etc.), I missed feature complete chat interfaces. Tools like LMStudio are super powerful, but there's a learning curve to it. I'd like to hit a middleground of simplicity and customizability for advanced users. Here's what separates RecurseChat out from similar apps: - UX designed for you to use local AI as a daily driver.…
2024 · recurse.chat · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
Aug 2026 · cactuscompute.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN, Henry & Roman here from Cactus. A small, on-device model is fast and private, but sometimes wrong, but frontier models are getting expensive pretty fast. So, we post-trained Gemma 4 E2B post-trained to know when it's wrong. Every response comes with a confidence score between 0 and 1. Developers can accept the on-device when it's high, hand off to a bigger cloud model when it's low. By routing only 15-35% of queries to Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemma-4-E2B matches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on most benchmarks. - ChartQA: 15-20% - LibriSpeech: 25-30% - MMBench, GigaSpeech, MMAU: 30-35% -…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi HN A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too. While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Run leading vision models locally with the new engine
2025 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Ollama▲235The easiest way to run large language models locally
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
NativeMind▲468Your fully private, open-source, on-device AI assistant
2025 · nativemind.app · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12OS
Complete AI Platform: RAG Systems & Intelligent Agents for Local AI
2025 · rlama.dev · its alternatives →
- 13
I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
- 15
I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
ModelHub▲317The missing menu bar app for local LLMs on Mac.
May 2026 · studio.consciousengines.com · its alternatives →
- 17
PrismML builds 1-bit and ternary Bonsai models that pack advanced reasoning, tool use, and multimodal AI into phones, laptops, and efficient data centers.
Mar 2026 · prismml.com · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19
Hey everyone, We have been building SecureAI Tools -- an open-source application layer for ChatGPT and ChatPDF-like AI tools. It works with locally running LLMs as well as with OpenAI-compatible APIs. For local LLMs, it supports Ollama which supports all the gguf/ggml models. Currently, it has two features: Chat-with-LLM, and Chat-with-PDFs. It is optimized for self-hosting use cases and comes with basic user management features. Here are some quick demos: * Chat with documents using OpenAI's GPT3.5 model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br2D3G9O47s * Chat with documents…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
This lets you talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes. I saw Obsidian Ollama (https://github.com/hinterdupfinger/obsidian-ollama) and thought it was handy, but I'm too lazy to migrate away from the Apple ecosystem, so I quickly hacked this together. I tend to use Notes as a scratchpad for prompts, so it's nice to do some quick inference without leaving the app. Notes doesn't really support plugins so I'm using the macOS accessibility API for reading selections and then stream responses using the clipboard (not ideal but it works).
2024 · smallest.app · its alternatives →
- 22
Ollama for classical ML models. AOT compiler that turns XGBoost, LightGBM, scikit-learn, CatBoost & ONNX models into native C99 inference code. One command to load, one command to serve. 336x faster than Python inference. - kossisoroyce/timber
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Local voice chatbot for engaging conversations, powered by Ollama, Hugging Face Transformers, and Coqui TTS Toolkit - mezbaul-h/june
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
A simple mobile web app inspired by Fuzzy-Search/realtime-bakllava that uses llama.cpp server backend with multimodal mode to describe and narrate what the phone camera sees. I built this thing in a few hours using a single ChatGPT thread to generate most things for me and iterate on this project. Here's the workflow: https://chat.openai.com/share/ea84ec69-5617-45e8-8772-ac2dcf...
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →