Question 1

Ollama or TextGen (text-generation-webui): which should a small business choose?

Accepted Answer

Choose Ollama if you want: fewer license conditions (Permissive vs Network copyleft (AGPL)) and larger community (185k vs 47.7k GitHub stars). Ollama and TextGen (text-generation-webui) publish no official RAM figure, so we cannot compare hosting cost directly.

Question 2

Which is cheaper to self-host, Ollama or TextGen (text-generation-webui)?

Accepted Answer

Ollama: not estimated (no official RAM figure). TextGen (text-generation-webui): not estimated (no official RAM figure). Our estimate is the cheapest Hetzner Cloud plan that meets each project's official RAM and vCPU figure; it covers the server only.

Question 3

How much hardware do Ollama and TextGen (text-generation-webui) need?

Accepted Answer

Ollama: not published. TextGen (text-generation-webui): not published.

Question 4

What is the license difference between Ollama and TextGen (text-generation-webui)?

Accepted Answer

Ollama: MIT (Permissive). Permissive. Internal and commercial use allowed. Individual models have their own licenses. TextGen (text-generation-webui): AGPL-3.0 (Network copyleft (AGPL)). Free for internal and commercial use. If you modify TextGen and let users interact with it over a network, you must offer them the modified source under AGPL-3.0. Models have their own licenses. This is a summary, not legal advice.

Question 5

Is Ollama or TextGen (text-generation-webui) more actively maintained?

Accepted Answer

Ollama: Active, last commit Oct 30, 2026. TextGen (text-generation-webui): Active, last commit Aug 17, 2026. GitHub data refreshed Oct 30, 2026.

Question 6

Which is easier to deploy, Ollama or TextGen (text-generation-webui)?

Accepted Answer

Ollama installs via Docker (or install script) (multi-container stack); TextGen (text-generation-webui) via Docker Compose (built locally from the repo) (multi-container stack). Ollama lists 2 known gotchas and TextGen (text-generation-webui) lists 4; see each app page.

	Ollama	TextGen (text-generation-webui)
Category	Local model runtimes	Local model runtimes
What it is	The simplest way to download and run open-weight LLMs locally behind an API.	Local LLM app (formerly text-generation-webui) with a browser UI, OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API and LoRA training.
License	MIT	AGPL-3.0
License type	Permissive	Network copyleft (AGPL)
License conditions	Permissive. Internal and commercial use allowed. Individual models have their own licenses.	Free for internal and commercial use. If you modify TextGen and let users interact with it over a network, you must offer them the modified source under AGPL-3.0. Models have their own licenses.
Status	Active	Active
GitHub stars	185k	47.7k
Last commit	Oct 30, 2026	Aug 17, 2026
Latest release	v0.40.13	v4.9
Minimum hardware	Not published	Not published
Recommended hardware	Not published	Not published
RAM measured by us	85 MiB idle, 1.9 GiB working (our test, v0.40.8, Oct 22, 2026)	Not tested yet
GPU	NVIDIA GPUs need compute capability 5.0+ and driver 550+ (570+ for compute capability 5.0–6.2). CPU-only also works.	Optional. Docker variants exist for NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Arc (beta) and CPU-only inference; portable builds come in CUDA, Vulkan, ROCm and CPU-only versions.
Est. server cost	from €19.99/mo (based on our test, not official)	Not estimated
Deploy method	Docker (or install script)	Docker Compose (built locally from the repo)
Known gotchas	2 listed	4 listed
Telemetry	Not documented	None (documented)
Calls home by default	Yes, by default	No (documented)
SSO (OIDC / SAML / LDAP)	Not documented	Not documented
Audit log	Not documented	Not documented
RBAC	Not documented	Not documented
Details	Full Ollama guide →	Full TextGen (text-generation-webui) guide →

Ollama vs TextGen (text-generation-webui)

Short answer