Jan
Open source and similar in spirit, good for individuals.
Locul / Compare / LM Studio alternative
LM Studio alternative: private AI your whole firm can use.
LM Studio is the easiest way to run open models on a laptop, and it has been free for work since July 2025. It is built for one person at a desk. When 40 people need the same private AI, with logins, shared files and a record of who asked what, you need a different shape of tool.
The short answer
LM Studio is a free desktop app for downloading and running open models on your own computer, fully offline. It has no user accounts, roles or central admin in the app itself; an Enterprise plan adds SSO and controls over models and MCP tools.
Locul is a shared private workspace for a whole firm, on dedicated servers in the UK, the EU or your building, with permissions, a full audit log and bots that ask before anything is sent.
Credit where it is due
Where LM Studio shines.
LM Studio does what it does very well, and many people at your firm may already use it.
- Free for personal and work use, with no form or licence needed
- llama.cpp and MLX engines, so it runs well on Apple Silicon
- Runs fully offline once a model is downloaded
- An OpenAI-compatible local server, a CLI and SDKs for developers
- Chat with documents, also offline
Signs you have outgrown it
When a team needs more than LM Studio.
These come from LM Studio's design as a personal app, not from flaws in it.
Forty laptops, forty setups
Each install has its own models, settings and documents, and there is no central admin in the app.
Laptops that cannot run it
Good answers need a recent machine with plenty of memory. Not everyone in the office has one.
Nobody can say what was asked
We found no audit trail, which a regulator or client may expect.
You want to share it as a service
LM Studio's terms do not allow offering it as a hosted service, so serving it to the office from one box is a licensing question as well as a technical one.
Side by side
LM Studio vs Locul for a 20 to 150 person firm.
Checked against LM Studio's own website and documentation in October 2026. Products change quickly, so check anything that matters to you on their site too.
| LM Studio | Locul | |
|---|---|---|
| How it runs | A desktop app on each computer | A browser app for everyone, from one private deployment |
| Hardware | Each user's own machine | Dedicated GPU servers in the UK, the EU or your building |
| User accounts and admin | None in the app; SSO on the Enterprise plan | Accounts, admin and single sign-on available |
| Shared team knowledge | Not built in | One team brain over your drives and wiki |
| Permissions on documents | Not applicable, files are local | Answers follow the permissions already on your files |
| Audit log | Not found | Every question, answer and file used |
| Approval before anything leaves | Not found | Every email or post a bot drafts waits for a person |
| Price | Free for work | Per seat, see the pricing page |
Fair summary: for one person trying models, LM Studio is better and free. For a firm that needs one governed service, it was not designed for the job.
The difference in one question
A shared brain knows which file is the live one.
A desktop AI app only knows the files on one person's laptop. A team workspace knows the shared folders, who may open them, and what happened to each version.
Jonas, Sales, Hamburg office
kurze Frage, which version of the Halvorsen framework agreement is the live one?? Lena says v7 but the folder has v7_final, v7_final_FINAL and 'v8 DRAFT do not send'. Customer wants the liability cap clause by 3pm their time, so 2pm ours.
The live one is v7_final_FINAL, signed 2 September 2026. v7_final was replaced the same day after Halvorsen's legal team changed the payment terms in clause 9. 'v8 DRAFT' is a proposal from Lena from October and has not been agreed.
The liability cap is clause 14.2: 150% of the fees paid in the previous 12 months, excluding data protection claims, which are uncapped.
v7_final_FINAL.pdf (signed)Email, M. Berg, 2 SeptLena's note, 14 Oct
An example. The company, customer and people are invented.
Other LM Studio alternatives
Not every team needs Locul.
If you are one person, or you have an engineer who wants to run it, one of these may suit you better.
Ollama with Open WebUI
The usual DIY route to a shared server. See our Open WebUI comparison.
vLLM
A fast engine for serving many users at once, for engineers who will run it.
Our honest take
Keep LM Studio for experiments. Use a workspace for client work.
Your technical people will keep LM Studio for trying new models, and they should. Client work needs a different setup: one place, the same files for everyone, permissions, a full log and a person approving anything that leaves. Locul gives you that without anyone becoming the office AI administrator.
The Office AI Benchmark
We test open models on real office work: messy emails, spreadsheets with broken formulas, forwarded chains with the ask buried in paragraph four. See how close they get to the big cloud models.
LM Studio alternative questions
Asked by teams before they switch.
Does LM Studio work without internet?
Yes. Once you have downloaded a model, LM Studio runs fully offline on your computer.
Is LM Studio free for business?
Yes. Since July 2025 LM Studio has been free for work use, with no licence form. An Enterprise plan adds features such as SSO and controls over which models and MCP tools people can use.
Is it safe to use LM Studio at work?
The models run on your machine, so prompts do not leave it. The risks are the usual ones for local files: laptops get lost, and there is no central log of what was asked. For client data, a governed shared service is easier to defend.
Which is better, LM Studio or Open WebUI?
They do different jobs. LM Studio is a desktop app for one person. Open WebUI is a server app for a team, which someone has to host and maintain.
Keep comparing
Other tools teams move from.
Next step
See Locul doing your team's real work.
One call. We set up a demo on files like yours, so you can compare it with LM Studio side by side.
- One shared workspace for the whole firm
- Runs in the UK, the EU or your building
- Set up and kept running for you