Ollama — Free Alternative to ChatGPT Plus

At a glance

GitHub repo

ollama/ollama

GitHub stars

186,597 (checked 11 November 2026)

Licence

MIT

Main language

Go

Replaces

ChatGPT Plus

Paid price it replaces

$20/month (no annual plan)

Best for

Anyone who wants private, offline AI chat without a $20 monthly subscription.

Prices were checked on the vendor's pricing page on 11 November 2026 and may have changed since. Star counts are a snapshot from the same date.

What Ollama does

Ollama runs large language models directly on your own computer. You download a model such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma or gpt-oss, and it answers from your machine instead of from a cloud server. Your prompts never leave your computer, which is the whole point: notes, drafts and questions stay private by design, and the chat works offline once the model is downloaded.

The comparison is ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month with no annual plan. Ollama costs nothing beyond the electricity and the hardware you already own. The trade-off is capability and convenience. A model running on a laptop is not as strong as the largest cloud models, and larger models need more RAM and a decent GPU to answer at a comfortable speed. On a modern machine, smaller models answer quickly and are good enough for drafting, summarising, coding help and everyday questions.

Ollama is a command-line tool at heart, but it is a short step from the terminal to a friendly interface. Open WebUI is a popular free web front end that gives Ollama a chat window much like the one ChatGPT users already know. Models are pulled by name, so switching from one model to another is a single command.

If your reason for paying $20 a month is privacy, offline use, or simply not wanting another subscription, Ollama is the most direct replacement in this series. Install it, pull one model, and you have a private AI chat running on your own hardware within minutes.

Why it is worth using for free

• Your prompts and documents never leave your computer — private by design, and it works offline
• No monthly fee: the only cost is electricity and hardware you already own
• Runs well-known open models (DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, gpt-oss) with a one-command download
• Pairs with free web front ends such as Open WebUI for a ChatGPT-style chat window

How to use Ollama

Download Ollama from ollama.com for Windows, macOS or Linux and install it. Then pull a model with `ollama pull llama3` (or qwen, deepseek or gemma) and start chatting with `ollama run llama3` in your terminal.

For a graphical chat window, install Open WebUI and point it at Ollama. Start with a smaller model if your machine is modest — it will answer faster — and move to a larger model only if you have the RAM and GPU for it.

Frequently asked questions