Three ways to run a model on your own Mac.

Slate, LM Studio and Ollama all keep the model on your machine. They are not the same kind of thing, and for a lot of people the honest answer is one of the other two. Here is what each is for, and where the line actually falls.

Facts about other projects are taken from their own documentation and licences, linked below, and were checked in July 2026. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it: contact.

Sources: Ollama on GitHub · lmstudio.ai · Slate on GitHub. Checked July 2026.

Looking for an LM Studio alternative on Mac

LM Studio is good at the thing it is built for: browsing models, loading one, and chatting with it while you tune the settings. If that is what you want, it is free and it does it well, and you do not need us.

Two reasons people come to Slate instead. The first is the source: LM Studio's desktop app is proprietary, and Slate's core is MIT on GitHub, so an offline claim is something you can read rather than something you are told. The second is that Slate is a workstation rather than a model browser. One app holds chat, an agent that can edit files, image generation, voice, dictation, scheduled automations, and several models answering the same question at once. And the phone in your pocket drives all of it.

Looking for an Ollama GUI on Mac

Ollama is a runtime and an API, and it is genuinely excellent at that. If you are writing code that talks to a local model, or serving one to scripts and containers, Ollama is the right tool and Slate is not competing with it.

Slate is not an Ollama front end. It runs llama.cpp itself, in process, so there is no second daemon to keep alive and no HTTP hop between the window and the weights. That is a trade: you give up Ollama's model library and its ecosystem of clients, and you get one application with no moving parts between you and the model. If what you actually wanted was a window onto an Ollama server you already run, one of the open-source front ends will serve you better than we will.

Looking for a local ChatGPT on Mac

This is the comparison worth being blunt about, in both directions.

A model running on your Mac will not match a frontier model in a data centre. It cannot: it is a fraction of the size and it is answering on a laptop. What it does instead is answer without your work leaving the machine, without an account, without a monthly bill, and without a rate limit. For a great deal of everyday work, that trade is worth making, and for some work it is the only version that is allowed at all.

Slate also does not pretend cloud models do not exist. If you have an API key, it will use it, and it will tell you clearly when a turn is leaving your machine. Silent Mode blocks every outbound request when you want the guarantee rather than the intention.

What Slate expects of you

Slate ships no chat or image models. You bring your own, downloaded through the built-in model manager or from a folder you already have, or you bring an API key. That is a deliberate choice, and it has a cost: the first run asks you to pick something before the app can answer, and the right pick depends on how much memory your Mac has. Slate shows you which models fit before you download them — the memory guide explains the arithmetic — but it is still a step that Ollama's one-line install and LM Studio's curated list do not ask of you.

You also need a Mac on Apple silicon running macOS 26. Slate is not on Windows or Linux and there is no plan for either.