head to head · open source
Ollama vs vllm
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars, 17,917 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vllm has 92,028 stars, 22,335 forks, 7,953 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 97% (181,161 vs 92,028 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; vllm is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, vllm 24%. vllm was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (deepseek, gpt-oss, llama, 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 | vllm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 92K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 22K |
| 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 vllm if
- You want the vllm 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 vllm 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 vllm
vLLM is a high throughput, memory efficient Python library for LLM inference and serving, built for ML engineers and platform teams who need to run open weight models on their own hardware at production scale.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or vllm more popular?
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars and vllm has 92,028. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and vllm free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and vllm under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and vllm?
Ollama is written in Go and vllm 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 vllm?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,161 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vllm if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.