Locally AI vs Private LLM

Locally AI

• Trying open models on an iPhone, iPad or Mac at no cost
• LM Studio users who want their desktop models on a phone
• Private chats that work with no connection and no account

Private LLM

• Apple users who want AI chat that never leaves the device
• People who prefer a single purchase to a monthly subscription
• Building Siri and Shortcuts workflows around a local model

Locally AI

• It is available only for recent iPhone, iPad and Mac models, and is optimized for Apple Silicon chips.
• Which models run depends on the device's memory; the site points to iPad and Mac for the largest ones.
• Using larger models through LM Link requires LM Studio running on a computer of your own.
• LM Studio acquired the app in April 2026, and the App Store now lists it as Locally AI by LM Studio.

Private LLM

• It cannot read documents or files, and it has no internet access for live information.
• Models cannot be loaded from Hugging Face; only those the developer has quantized are offered, and they are text-only.
• Larger models need recent hardware: the vendor recommends an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and an Apple Silicon Mac.
• The Android version is an early beta offered as a direct APK download, not through Google Play.

Locally AI

On-device models through MLX

Downloads and runs open models from the Llama, Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek, SmolLM, Granite, Cogito and LFM families on Apple Silicon, using Apple's MLX framework.

Offline, with no account

Once a model is downloaded, chats run with no internet connection and no login. The vendor says processing stays on the device and no data is collected.

LM Link to LM Studio

Links the app to LM Studio on your own computer over an end-to-end encrypted connection, so an iPhone or iPad can use larger models than it could run itself.

Local voice mode

Holds real-time spoken conversations with a model, with the speech handled on the device instead of by a cloud service.

Language and vision models

Some models take images as well as text, so a chat can analyze a picture. The app also supports Apple's on-device Foundation Models on current OS releases.

Siri, Shortcuts and Control Center

Talk to a local model through Siri, call models from the Shortcuts app to build automations, and open the app from Control Center, the Lock Screen or the Action Button.

Private LLM

On-device chat with open models

Runs open-source models such as Llama 3.3, Qwen3, Gemma 3, Phi 4 and DeepSeek R1 Distill on the device. The site's catalog lists 142 models, filterable by device, memory and use case.

No account and no cloud

Prompts are processed on the device and nothing is sent to a server. The app needs no login and, according to the vendor, collects no personal data.

Siri and Shortcuts

Two app intents work with Siri and the Shortcuts app, and x-callback-url support lets other apps pass text in and get the model's reply back.

Writing tools across macOS

On a Mac, select text in any app and right-click to rewrite, summarize or correct it on-device. This works in English and major Western European languages.

In-house quantization

Models are compressed by the developer with OmniQuant and GPTQ, which the vendor says keeps output closer to the original model than the round-to-nearest method used by llama.cpp and MLX apps.

System prompts and sampling settings

The system prompt can be customized to shape how a model responds, and sampling temperature and Top-P can be changed from their defaults; those changes apply after the app restarts.

Locally AI

• Free$0

  The full app for iPhone, iPad and Mac: local models, voice mode, Siri and Shortcuts actions, and LM Link to LM Studio.

Private LLM

• Private LLM$4.99

  one-time purchase

  One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac with every model in the catalog, and can be shared with up to six people through Family Sharing.

Locally AI

No public discounts listed.

Private LLM

• Lifetime license

  One purchase for every Apple device

  Private LLM is bought once with no subscription. The purchase unlocks the iPhone, iPad and Mac versions and extends to a Family Sharing group of up to six people.