head to head · open source
Ollama vs kvcached
Ollama has 181,765 GitHub stars, 18,010 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kvcached has 1,506 stars, 181 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Ollama leads on adoption by 11,969% (181,765 vs 1,506 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; kvcached is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, kvcached 12%. 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 | kvcached | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 182K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-26 | 2026-09-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 181 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 182K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kvcached if
- You want the kvcached feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kvcached 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 kvcached
kvcached is an Apache 2.0 Python library that gives LLM serving engines a virtual memory style, elastic KV cache, letting several models share one GPU's memory instead of partitioning it rigidly — it is built for ML infrastructure and platform engineers who serve LLMs on shared or capacity constrained GPUs.
read the full kvcached overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or kvcached more popular?
Ollama has 181,765 GitHub stars and kvcached has 1,506. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and kvcached free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and kvcached under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and kvcached?
Ollama is written in Go and kvcached in Python. 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 kvcached?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,765 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kvcached if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.