# KoboldCpp vs LocalAI (slim)

> LocalAI scores 68 (B) on agent readiness against KoboldCpp's 60.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do local inference. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koboldcpp-vs-localai.md (~2,550 tokens) · this version ~630 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koboldcpp-vs-localai.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/koboldcpp-vs-localai
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

LocalAI scores 68 (B) on agent readiness against KoboldCpp's 60.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do local inference.

- KoboldCpp: C 60.5, rank #462 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/koboldcpp.min.md
- LocalAI: B 68, rank #216 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/localai.min.md
- KoboldCpp, good for An owner who wants text, image, speech and music models behind one executable with a writing and roleplay interface, and clients that speak the KoboldAI, OpenAI, Ollama or Anthropic formats. Also No key needed to call it; No incidents deducted, where LocalAI loses 3 points for them.
- LocalAI, good for An owner who wants one local server for chat, embeddings, reranking, speech, images and video behind APIs their existing OpenAI, Anthropic or Ollama clients already speak, on almost any accelerator. Ahead on Reliability, 84 against 68; Schema & documentation, 81 against 68; Agent ergonomics, 71 against 63; Security & auth, 62 against 38. Also Runs on your own machine.

| Category | KoboldCpp | LocalAI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 68 | 84 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 68 | 81 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 63 | 71 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 38 | 62 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 82 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 49 | 47 |

| Fact (where they differ) | KoboldCpp | LocalAI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | LostRuins (Concedo) | Ettore Di Giacinto and the LocalAI team |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | None | OAuth or key |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 for KoboldCpp and KoboldAI Lite. The bundled GGML, llama.cpp and stable-diffusion.cpp code stays under MIT | MIT. Each backend image wraps an upstream engine (llama.cpp, vLLM, whisper.cpp, diffusers and others) under that engine's own licence |
| Tools exposed | none | 42 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-27 | 2026-10-02 |
| Popularity | 12k stars | 48k stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |