Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Timber – Ollama for classical ML models, 336x faster than Python

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

Timber is a development tool that runs classical machine learning models faster than Python implementations. Built as an Ollama-equivalent for ML workflows, it delivers 336x performance improvements for model inference… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
Ollama v0.19▲410
Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX
Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
2
GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark▲277
An ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex
Feb 2026 · openai.com · its alternatives →
3
1Code▲569
Just 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 →
4OS
Open-Source DocumentAI with Ollama▲295
Complete AI Platform: RAG Systems & Intelligent Agents for Local AI
2025 · rlama.dev · its alternatives →
5
TensorZero▲307
Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
Ollama – Run LLMs on your Mac▲284
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 →
7
Speeding up LLM inference 2x times (possibly)▲419
Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1/M2/M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…
2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →
8
80% faster, 50% less memory, 0% loss of accuracy Llama finetuning▲385
Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Ollama Desktop App▲481
The easiest way to chat with local AI
2025 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
10
Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine▲99
Working on Mac, Linux, and Windows now. I include a simple GUI to find new models and get things built and set up. It is working quite well across a few models for me. The GitHub README and DESIGN.md files go into detail of the how/why and it's working remarkably well so far. https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn
Aug 2026 · notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io · its alternatives →
11
Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones▲231
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…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
Ollama multimodal engine▲277
Run leading vision models locally with the new engine
2025 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
13
Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA▲205
Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
RLAMA▲138
Open-Source RAG CLI for Ollama
2025 · rlama.dev · its alternatives →
15
Ollama▲235
The easiest way to run large language models locally
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Ollamac▲205
A macOS app for interacting with the Ollama models
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
17HP
High-performance ahead-of-time compiler for Machine Learning▲83
2018 · scss.tcd.ie · its alternatives →
18
GUIs for Faster ML Prototyping and Sharing▲85
Build and share delightful machine learning apps, all in Python. 🌟 Star to support our work! - gradio-app/gradio
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
KTransformers–236B Model and 1M Context LLM Inference on Local Machines▲20
Hey Hacker News! We are excited to share our open-source project, KTransformers, a flexible framework designed for cutting-edge LLM inference optimizations! Leveraging state-of-the-art kernels from llamafile and marlin, KTransformers seamlessly enhances the performance of HuggingFace Transformers, making it possible to operate large 236B MoE models or extremely long 1M context locally with promising speed. KTransformers is a Python-centric framework designed with extensibility at its core. By implementing and injecting an optimized module with a single line of code, users gain access to a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
Model2vec – Lightning-fast Static Embeddings for RAG/Semantic Search▲28
We’ve recently open-sourced Model2vec, a method to distill sentence transformers into static embeddings that outperform all previous approaches by a large margin on MTEB. Our new models set a new state-of-the-art for static embeddings. Main features: - Our best model (potion-base-8M) has only 8M parameters, which is ~30mb on disk - Inference is ~500x faster than the distilled base model (bge-base), on a CPU - New models can be distilled in 30 seconds on a CPU without requiring a dataset - just a vocabulary - Numpy-only inference: The packaged can be install the package with minimal…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
Cloud-native Stack for Ollama - Build locally and push to deploy▲21
Ollama Cloud is a Highly Scalable Cloud-native Stack for Ollama - ollama-cloud/get-started
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
Shimmy – 5MB privacy-first, local alternative to Ollama (680MB)▲14
⚡ Pure-Rust WebGPU inference engine — OpenAI-API compatible, GGUF native, runs on any GPU. No Python. No llama.cpp. Single binary. - Michael-A-Kuykendall/shimmy
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
23WD
Web demo of 13B Alpaca-LLaMA trained on improved Stanford dataset▲42
2023 · lama.nbnl.uk · its alternatives →
24
Model2vec-Rs – Fast Static Text Embeddings in Rust▲60
Hey HN! We’ve just open-sourced model2vec-rs, a Rust crate for loading and running Model2Vec static embedding models with zero Python dependency. This allows you to embed text at (very) high throughput; for example, in a Rust-based microservice or CLI tool. This can be used for semantic search, retrieval, RAG, or any other text embedding usecase. Main Features: - Rust-native inference: Load any Model2Vec model from Hugging Face or your local path with StaticModel::from_pretrained(...). - Tiny footprint: The crate itself is only ~1.7 mb, with embedding models between 7 and 30 mb. Performance:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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