head to head · open source
Ollama vs examples
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars, 17,921 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. examples has 3,043 stars, 1,073 forks, 64 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. Ollama leads on adoption by 5,854% (181,184 vs 3,043 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; examples is written in Jupyter Notebook under MIT. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, examples 35%. Ollama 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.
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Side by side
| Ollama | examples | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Jupyter Notebook |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick examples if
- You want the examples feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Jupyter Notebook
- You evaluated both and examples fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama overview →
About examples
Pinecone Examples is an MIT licensed collection of Jupyter Notebooks and sample applications that lets developers get hands on with Pinecone vector databases and common AI patterns, tools, and algorithms.
read the full examples overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or examples more popular?
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars and examples has 3,043. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and examples free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and examples under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and examples?
Ollama is written in Go and examples in Jupyter Notebook. 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 examples?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,184 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose examples if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.