head to head · open source
Ollama vs Beam
Ollama has 185,702 GitHub stars, 18,873 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Beam has 1,842 stars, 175 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 9,982% (185,702 vs 1,842 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; Beam is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Beam 10%. Beam was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (llm), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Ollama | Beam | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 186K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 19K | ⑂ 175 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 186K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Beam if
- You want the Beam feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Beam fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama Start building with open models. Download macOS or download manually Windows or download manually Linux Manual install instructions Docker The official Ollama Docker image ollama/ollama is available on Docker Hub. Libraries ollama python ollama js Community Discord 𝕏 (Twitter) Reddit Get started You'll be prompted to run a model or connect Ollama to your existing agents or applications such as Claude Code , OpenClaw , OpenCode , Codex , Copilot , and more. Coding To launch a specific integration: Supported integrations include Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, DeepSeek Harness, Droid, and OpenCode. AI…
read the full Ollama overview →
About Beam
Run AI Workloads at Scale Beam is a fast, open source runtime for serverless AI workloads. It gives you a Pythonic interface to deploy and scale AI applications with zero infrastructure overhead. ✨ Features Fast Cold Starts : Launch containers in under a second using a custom container runtime, scheduler, and embedded caching Parallelization and Concurrency : Fan out workloads to 100s of containers First Class Developer Experience : Hot reloading, webhooks, and scheduled jobs Scale to Zero : Workloads are serverless by default Volume Storage : Mount distributed storage volumes GPU Support : Run on our cloud…
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More Machine Learning Infrastructure projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Machine Learning Infrastructure field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or Beam more popular?
Ollama has 185,702 GitHub stars and Beam has 1,842. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and Beam free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and Beam under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and Beam?
Ollama is written in Go and Beam in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ollama or Beam?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (185,702 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Beam if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.