LM Studio
FreeRun local LLMs in a desktop GUI — free for personal and commercial use
A desktop client for local LLMs: model search, quantization picker, VRAM estimates and parameter tuning all in a GUI, no command line needed. Closed source, but free for both personal and commercial use since July 2025 — no licence request, no account required to download models. A paid Enterprise tier exists for organizations.
Why we picked it
The only closed-source option among the common four — yet its terms are more permissive than some open projects: free for personal and commercial use since July 2025, no form to fill in, and no account needed to download models.
It wins on polish. Whether a model is findable, whether your VRAM can hold a given quantization, how to tune the parameters — it is all surfaced in the UI. For anyone who would rather not touch a terminal, this is the least friction of the group.
The cost is that it is closed source: you cannot audit what it does, and you cannot modify it. If that bothers you, Jan is the Apache 2.0 equivalent.