By mid-2026, three desktop tools dominate local, private AI: Ollama, LM Studio, and Jan. All three are free, run the same underlying inference engine, and keep data on the user's machine. Ollama is a lean background daemon built for developers and automation. LM Studio is a polished graphical app that made itself free for commercial use in July 2025. Jan is the fully open-source (Apache 2.0) purist that also doubles as a unified front-end for cloud APIs. The article compares them on speed, memory, model support, pricing, and developer ergonomics.