Side-by-side comparison of free tiers, features, privacy, and company background. Updated for 2026.
Best all-around open LLM — 8B to 405B
Meta's Llama family is the most widely adopted open LLM, with sizes from 8B (runs on a laptop) to 405B (rivals GPT-4). It supports 128K context, has a massive fine-tune ecosystem, and its permissive license allows commercial use. The default choice for anyone building on open-source language models.
Install Ollama and run 'ollama run llama3' → Start chatting locally with zero cloud dependency → Scale up to larger variants as needed
Best compact MoE — Apache 2.0
Mistral AI, based in Paris, produces the best compact Mixture-of-Experts models under Apache 2.0. Mixtral 8x7B activates only 2 experts per token, delivering near-70B performance at 13B inference cost. A top pick for European-based teams wanting strong open models with EU-friendly provenance.
Run 'ollama run mixtral' for the MoE model locally → Or use Mistral 7B for a lighter single-GPU option → Deploy with vLLM or TGI for production serving