AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Unsloth
Finetune LLMs 2x faster, 80% less memory
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1

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 →
- 2

I've been playing around with https://github.com/zphang/minimal-llama/ and https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py, and wanted to create a simple UI where you can just paste text, tweak the parameters, and finetune the model quickly using a modern GPU. To prepare the data, simply separate your text with two blank lines. There's an inference tab, so you can test how the tuned model behaves. This is my first foray into the world of LLM finetuning, Python, Torch, Transformers, LoRA, PEFT, and Gradio. Enjoy!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
DeepSeek-R1-0528▲218New open-source LLM that rivals o3 in coding & reasoning
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 4

Hi HN community, I have been working on benchmarking publicly available LLMs these past couple of weeks. More precisely, I am interested on the finetuning piece since a lot of businesses are starting to entertain the idea of self-hosting LLMs trained on their proprietary data rather than relying on third party APIs. To this point, I am tracking the following 4 pillars of evaluation that businesses are typically look into: - Performance - Time to train an LLM - Cost to train an LLM - Inference (throughput / latency / cost per token) For each LLM, my aim is to benchmark them for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

2024 · colab.research.google.com · its alternatives →
- 6

The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

- 8
Mistral Small 3▲446High performance in a 24b open-source model
2025 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →
- 9

Posted before, but wanted to share if you want an open source alternative to OpenAI fine-tuning, give Unsloth a try! Phi 3.5 was just released, and is distilled from GPT4. Unsloth makes finetuning 2x faster, uses 70% less VRAM + has no accuracy degradations. We rewrite all backprop steps and reduce FLOPs and write everything in Triton (JIT low level CUDA). If you want to own the weights after fine-tuning, give Unsloth a spin! I have free Colabs and Kaggle notebooks as well at https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth
2024 · colab.research.google.com · its alternatives →
- 10
SelfHostLLM▲134A simple calculator that estimates how many concurrent requests your GPU can handle for a given LLM, with shareable results.
2025 · selfhostllm.org · its alternatives →
- 11

Hey HN, we wanted to share our repo where we fine-tuned Llama 3.1 on Google TPUs. We’re building AI infra to fine-tune and serve LLMs on non-NVIDIA GPUs (TPUs, Trainium, AMD GPUs). The problem: Right now, 90% of LLM workloads run on NVIDIA GPUs, but there are equally powerful and more cost-effective alternatives out there. For example, training and serving Llama 3.1 on Google TPUs is about 30% cheaper than NVIDIA GPUs. But developer tooling for non-NVIDIA chipsets is lacking. We felt this pain ourselves. We initially tried using PyTorch XLA to train Llama 3.1 on TPUs, but it was rough: xla…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

- 13
TurboQuant▲295New LLM compression algorithm by Google
Mar 2026 · research.google · its alternatives →
- 14

Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

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 →
- 16

- 17

Fine-tune LLMs from one YAML. Layer streaming trains an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU. - MakazhanAlpamys/Soup
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Hey HN! We’re building FinetuneDB (https://finetunedb.com/), an LLM fine-tuning platform. It enables teams to easily create and manage high-quality datasets, and streamlines the entire workflow from fine-tuning to serving and evaluating models with domain experts. You can check out our docs here: (https://docs.finetunedb.com/) FinetuneDB exists because creating and managing high-quality datasets is a real bottleneck when fine-tuning LLMs. The quality of your data directly impacts the performance of your fine-tuned models, and existing tools didn’t offer an easy…
2024 · finetunedb.com · its alternatives →
- 19
FinetuneDB▲52AI fine-tuning platform to create custom LLMs
2024 · finetunedb.com · its alternatives →
- 20

- 21
DeepHermes 3▲111Intuitive responses and deep reasoning, in one model
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 22

We built any-llm because we needed a lightweight router for LLM providers with minimal overhead. Switching between models is just a string change : update "openai/gpt-4" to "anthropic/claude-3" and you're done. It uses official provider SDKs when available, which helps since providers handle their own compatibility updates. No proxy or gateway service needed either, so getting started is pretty straightforward - just pip install and import. Currently supports 20+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and AWS Bedrock. Would love to hear what you think!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23

G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24UD
Hey HN! I’m the founder of Unify, and we’ve just released our Model Hub, which provides a collection of LLM endpoints with live runtime benchmarks all plotted across time: https://unify.ai/hub A key finding is that static tabular runtime benchmarks for LLMs simply do not work. It’s necessary to take a time-series perspective, and plot the variations through time. We currently have 21 models provided by: Anyscale, Perplexity AI, Replicate, Together AI, OctoAI, Mistral AI and OpenAI, with more on the roadmap. We test across different regions (Asia, US, Europe), with varied…
2024 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- 80% faster, 50% less memory, 0% loss of accuracy Llama finetuning alternatives
- Finetune LLaMA-7B on commodity GPUs using your own text alternatives
- DeepSeek-R1-0528 alternatives
- finetune LLMs via the Finetuning Hub alternatives
- Finetune Llama-3 2x faster in a Colab notebook alternatives
- I've built a locally running Perplexity clone alternatives
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 →