MLX LM vs TextGen

MLX LM

MIT, with no telemetry found in the source, and the tests passed on the last eight pushes to main. mlx_lm.server has no API key option, answers any origin by default and loads whichever model a request names, and its own docs say it is not recommended for production.

TextGen

AGPL-3.0 with no telemetry, and a local API on 127.0.0.1:5000 that checks the Host header, limits CORS to localhost and separates an admin key from the caller's key. No release since v4.9 on 20 May 2026, no code commits since 31 May, no test suite, and ten security advisories in the year, all fixed.

MLX LM

1. Keep mlx_lm.server on 127.0.0.1 and pass --allowed-origins with the origins you trust. There is no API key, and the default answers every origin
2. Treat any caller as able to load any model. The model and adapters request fields accept any Hugging Face repository or local path
3. Send max_tokens or max_completion_tokens when you need more than 512 tokens, the server default
4. Read errors as {"error": "<text>"} with 400 for a bad field and 404 for a model that failed to load. They are not OpenAI error objects
5. Poll GET /health before the first request. It answers 503 with unavailable when the generation thread has stopped

TextGen

1. Ask the owner to launch with --api. Nothing listens on port 5000 without it, and a model must be loaded first
2. Call http://127.0.0.1:5000/v1. Any Host header other than localhost or 127.0.0.1 gets 400 Invalid host header unless --listen is set
3. Send the key as Authorization: Bearer on OpenAI routes and as x-api-key on /v1/messages. Model loading needs the admin key
4. Read http://127.0.0.1:5000/docs or modules/api/typing.py for parameters. max_tokens defaults to 512 on chat completions
5. Run tool calls yourself. The API returns finish_reason: "tool_calls" and executes nothing on the server
6. Use the repository name oobabooga/textgen. The old text-generation-webui URL redirects