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 pageOllama vs text-generation-webui
Our take
Pick Ollama if developers and privacy-sensitive teams who have RAM/VRAM and want Llama/Gemma/DeepSeek without a per-seat chat plan. Pick text-generation-webui if people who already run a 16 GB+ GPU (or CPU) and will load a model file. Skip Ollama if someone who wants a polished hosted chat with browsing and image gen and will not download a 4–70B weight file. Skip text-generation-webui if people who want a
Best for
Ollama Keeping weights and prompts on hardware you control
text-generation-webui Talk to a GGUF/Transformers model you already downloaded
Free plan
Ollama $0 · no license fee. You pay electricity, disk, and GPU. The desktop app and CLI are free to download
text-generation-webui $0 · aGPL-3.0. You bring weights, VRAM, and (optionally) search keys
Lowest paid
Ollama
text-generation-webui Not published by the vendor
Coding agent
Ollama Claude Code
text-generation-webui
Runs where
Ollama Local or hosted
text-generation-webui Local or hosted
Watch out
Ollama Hardware is the bill
text-generation-webui $0 is the UI, not the GPU
Last checked
Ollama 2026-10-19 · ollama.com
text-generation-webui 2026-10-21 · github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui
Which one, then?
Pick text-generation-webui if
people who already run a 16 GB+ GPU (or CPU) and will load a model file.
Read the text-generation-webui page