Open source AI tools
Open source matters here for two practical reasons rather than ideological ones. You can run the tool on your own hardware, which keeps your data out of someone else's logs; and you are not exposed to a vendor changing its pricing, its terms or its mind.
The trade is real: you take on setup, hardware and maintenance. For a model you run occasionally, a hosted API is usually cheaper. For something you run constantly, or on data you cannot send anywhere, this list is where to look.
How these were chosen
- Weights or source are genuinely available, not just an open-ish licence
- Can be run independently of the vendor's hosted service
- Actively maintained
The image model that made local generation practical. Runs on consumer hardware and has the largest ecosystem of extensions and fine-tunes of anything here.
Open-source image generation you can run locally or in the cloud.
Stronger prompt adherence than Stable Diffusion for many prompts, and open weights. The current default for people who want quality locally.
Open-weight image model that rivals Midjourney at a fraction of the cost.
Open-weight language models that are competitive with hosted commercial models, and cheap to run via API if you do not want to host.
Open-source Chinese AI matching GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost.
Open-weight models with notably good multilingual coverage, which matters if you work outside English.
Alibaba's open-source multilingual AI with strong agentic abilities.
Open audio generation, useful when licensing of generated music matters and you need to know exactly what produced it.
Stability AI's open-source audio and music generation model.
Open source coding agent inside VS Code - you can read what it does before letting it edit your repository.
Open-source agentic AI coding assistant that runs inside VS Code.
Open source terminal coding agent that works through git, so every change it makes is inspectable and revertible.
Open-source CLI pair programmer that edits your code from the terminal.
More collections
Free AI video generators
AI video tools you can actually try without paying, with what each free tier really gives you and where the limits bite.
AI coding assistants
Coding tools compared by how they fit your workflow - editor, terminal or browser - and how much you can review before they change anything.
AI tools that run on your own machine
Tools that process your files, footage or audio locally, so nothing gets uploaded to someone else's servers.
AI tools for recruiters
Sourcing, screening and hiring tools, with a note on where automated decisions carry legal weight.
AI tools with no signup
Tools you can open and use immediately - no account, no email, no card.
Think something is missing?
Submit it and we will check it against the criteria above. Listing is free.
Submit a tool