head to head · open source
Ollama vs neuron-ai
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars, 17,921 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. neuron-ai has 2,098 stars, 246 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 8,536% (181,184 vs 2,098 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; neuron-ai is written in PHP under MIT. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, neuron-ai 12%. Ollama was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (llm, llms), 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 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Ollama | neuron-ai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 246 |
| 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 neuron-ai if
- You want the neuron-ai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and neuron-ai 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 neuron-ai
Create Full Featured Agentic Applications in PHP [!IMPORTANT] Get early access to new features, exclusive tutorials, and expert tips for building AI agents in PHP. Join a community of PHP developers pioneering the future of AI development. Subscribe to the newsletter Before moving on, support the Neuron AI community giving a GitHub star ⭐️. Thank you! What is Neuron? Neuron is a PHP framework for creating and orchestrating AI Agents. It allows you to integrate AI entities into your PHP applications with a powerful and flexible architecture. We provide tools for the entire agentic application development lifecycle…
read the full neuron-ai overview →
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 neuron-ai more popular?
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars and neuron-ai has 2,098. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and neuron-ai free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and neuron-ai under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and neuron-ai?
Ollama is written in Go and neuron-ai in PHP. 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 neuron-ai?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,184 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose neuron-ai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.