head to head · open source
Ollama vs Spanlens
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars, 17,917 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Spanlens has 13 stars, 0 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Ollama leads on adoption by 1,393,446% (181,161 vs 13 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; Spanlens is written in TypeScript under MIT. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Spanlens 0%. 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 | Spanlens | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 13 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 0 |
| 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 Spanlens if
- You want the Spanlens feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Spanlens 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 Spanlens
Spanlens is an MIT licensed, open source LLM observability and monitoring layer that sits as a drop in proxy in front of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini clients to log every call's cost, tokens, latency, and agent traces, built for developers running LLM applications in production who need more than a provider dashboard's total spend.
read the full Spanlens overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or Spanlens more popular?
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars and Spanlens has 13. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and Spanlens free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and Spanlens under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and Spanlens?
Ollama is written in Go and Spanlens in TypeScript. 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 Spanlens?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,161 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Spanlens if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.