# Foundry Local vs Lemonade (slim)

> Lemonade scores 63.8 (B) on agent readiness against Foundry Local's 60.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Foundry Local leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do local inference. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-lemonade.md (~2,750 tokens) · this version ~630 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-lemonade.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-lemonade
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Lemonade scores 63.8 (B) on agent readiness against Foundry Local's 60.5 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Foundry Local leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do local inference.

- Foundry Local: C 60.5, rank #461 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/foundry-local.min.md
- Lemonade: B 63.8, rank #336 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/lemonade.min.md
- Foundry Local, good for An application that ships a model to end users' Windows, macOS or Linux devices and wants NPU and GPU variants chosen automatically, especially on Windows. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 88 against 76; Transparency & trust, 72 against 64. Also No key needed to call it.
- Lemonade, good for An owner with AMD hardware (Ryzen AI NPUs, Radeon or Strix Halo) who wants one local server for chat, speech and images that existing OpenAI, Anthropic or Ollama clients can call, and for MCP clients that want local models as tools. Ahead on Reliability, 75 against 68; Schema & documentation, 70 against 53; Agent ergonomics, 70 against 61.

| Category | Foundry Local | Lemonade |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 68 | 75 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 53 | 70 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 61 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 39 | 36 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 88 | 76 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 72 | 64 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Foundry Local | Lemonade |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | SDK + MCP | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Microsoft | AMD and the Lemonade community |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Licence | MIT for the SDKs and the v2 native runtime. The CLI is closed source under Microsoft Software Licence Terms. Execution providers carry NVIDIA, Intel and Qualcomm licences, and each model carries its own | Apache 2.0. Each backend (llama.cpp, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion.cpp, FastFlowLM and others) is downloaded separately under its own licence |
| Tools exposed | none | 6 |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-10-07 |
| Popularity | 2.6k stars, 105k npm/wk, 47k PyPI/wk | 5.8k stars |