Best Local & Open-Weight LLMs (2026)
Open-weight and self-hostable large language models. Chinese and American labs compared — Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Nemotron, MiniMax, Falcon. Benchmarks, pricing, and hardware requirements (min/mid/max) for running each model locally.
10 tools reviewed
Tier Rankings
Detailed Comparison
| # | Tool | Score | Best For | Price | Free Tier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Qwen (Alibaba) | 8.8 | Developers who want frontier-tier open weights with Apache 2... | Free / $0.12 | Yes | Review |
| 2 |  MiniMax M2 / M2.5 | 8.4 | Agentic coding and tool-use workflows on a budget. Best pric... | Free / $0.30 | Yes | Review |
| 3 |  Gemma 4 (Google) | 8.3 | Developers and businesses who need a permissively licensed m... | Free / $0.14-0.40 | Yes | Review |
| 4 |  Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot) | 8.1 | Agentic coding workflows, tool-use agents, and teams willing... | Free / $0.60 | Yes | Review |
| 5 |  DeepSeek | 8.0 | Developers and teams who need strong reasoning and coding ca... | Free / $0.14 | Yes | Review |
| 6 |  GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) | 8.0 | Teams that need genuine MIT-licensed frontier open weights w... | Free / $0.60 | Yes | Review |
| 7 |  Llama 4 (Meta) | 7.9 | Developers and teams who need a permissively-licensed open-w... | Free / $3-8 | Yes | Review |
| 8 |  Nemotron (Nvidia) | 7.8 | Teams running on Nvidia hardware (TensorRT-LLM, NIM) who nee... | Free / varies | Yes | Review |
| 9 |  Mistral AI | 7.5 | Developers who want cheap, high-quality API access. Also str... | Free / $0.20 | Yes | Review |
| 10 |  Falcon (TII) | 7.1 | Developers who need a genuinely Apache-2.0 small model for o... | Free / varies | Yes | Review |
All Local & Open-Weight LLMs Reviews
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights family -- Qwen3.5, Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-VL, Qwen3-Max. Apache 2.0 flagship sizes.
MiniMax M2 / M2.5
MiniMax's open-weights frontier -- first open model to match Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 10-20× lower cost
Gemma 4 (Google)
Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices
Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot)
Moonshot's 1T-parameter MoE open-weights flagship -- best open-source agentic coder, rivals Claude Opus 4.5
DeepSeek
Near-frontier reasoning for pennies on the dollar -- the open-source LLM that made Silicon Valley nervous
GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)
Zhipu AI's open-weights family -- GLM-4.6 text flagship and GLM-4.6V multimodal, true MIT licensed
Llama 4 (Meta)
Meta's open-weights flagship family -- Scout (10M context), Maverick (multimodal 400B MoE), Behemoth in preview
Nemotron (Nvidia)
Nvidia's open-weights family -- hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture, optimized for efficient reasoning on Nvidia hardware
Mistral AI
European AI lab with open and commercial models that punch well above their size
Falcon (TII)
UAE's Technology Innovation Institute open-weights family -- Falcon 3 optimized for efficient sub-10B deployment on consumer hardware