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Local LLM

What is the best local LLM?

The best local LLM for most people in 2026 is a mid-size open model (7B–14B) via Ollama — pick by RAM and use case.

Answer

The best local LLM is the one that fits your hardware and task — not the biggest model you can barely load. Use Ollama's library and the Open LLM Leaderboard as starting points, then test on your own prompts.

General chat: Llama 3.2, Mistral, or Qwen 2.5 (7B–14B).

Coding: Qwen 2.5 Coder or DeepSeek Coder.

Low RAM (8 GB): Phi-3 or Llama 3.2 3B — see Microsoft Phi model family for small-model design goals.

High-end workstation (32 GB+ VRAM): 32B–70B quantizations for near-cloud quality per llama.cpp quantization support.

Install Ollama, try two models on real work, and keep the one with the best speed-to-quality ratio.

Sources

  1. Ollama model library
  2. Hugging Face — Open LLM Leaderboard
  3. Ollama — Llama 3.2
  4. Ollama — Mistral
  5. Ollama — Qwen 2.5
  6. Ollama — Qwen 2.5 Coder
  7. DeepSeek Coder V2 Lite
  8. Ollama — Phi-3
  9. Microsoft — Phi models
  10. llama.cpp

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