Pick Cerebras if
developers who will burn a $5 credit to measure tokens/sec, then pay per 1M.
Read the Cerebras pageCerebras vs Ollama
Our take
Pick Cerebras if developers who will burn a $5 credit to measure tokens/sec, then pay per 1M. Pick Ollama if developers and privacy-sensitive teams who have RAM/VRAM and want Llama/Gemma/DeepSeek without a per-seat chat plan. Skip Cerebras if people who want a local runtime (Ollama) or a multi-vendor router. Skip Ollama if someone who wants a polished hosted chat with browsing and image gen and will not download a
Best for
Cerebras Hit a very fast hosted model
Ollama Keeping weights and prompts on hardware you control
Free plan
Cerebras No free plan
Ollama $0 · no license fee. You pay electricity, disk, and GPU. The desktop app and CLI are free to download
Lowest paid
Cerebras GPT-OSS 120B $0.35
Ollama
Next step up
Cerebras Qwen 27B $0.99
Ollama
Coding agent
Cerebras Coding agent card
Ollama Claude Code
Runs where
Cerebras Hosted
Ollama Local or hosted
Watch out
Cerebras $5 is a coupon, not a plan
Ollama Hardware is the bill
Last checked
Cerebras 2026-10-21 · cerebras.ai/pricing
Ollama 2026-10-19 · ollama.com
Which one, then?
Pick Ollama if
developers and privacy-sensitive teams who have RAM/VRAM and want Llama/Gemma/DeepSeek without a per-seat chat plan.
Read the Ollama page