The best inference alternatives

transformers

huggingface/transformers

🤗 Transformers: the model-definition framework for state-of-the-art machine learning models in text, vision, audio, and multimodal models, for both inference and training.

Choose transformers if…

• you want the more widely starred option (168.5k)
• you specifically need audio or deep-learning

Shares gemma, glm, llm, machine-learning with inference.

vllm

vllm-project/vllm

A high-throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving engine for LLMs

Choose vllm if…

• you want the more widely starred option (96.2k)
• you specifically need amd or blackwell

Shares inference, kimi, llm, pytorch with inference.

LlamaFactory

hiyouga/LlamaFactory

Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ LLMs & VLMs (ACL 2024)

Choose LlamaFactory if…

• you want the more widely starred option (75.9k)
• you specifically need agent or ai

Shares gemma, llm, qwen, transformers with inference.

sglang

sgl-project/sglang

SGLang is a high-performance serving framework for large language models and multimodal models.

Choose sglang if…

• you want the more widely starred option (38.4k)
• you specifically need attention or blackwell

Shares glm, inference, llm, qwen with inference.

datasets

huggingface/datasets

🤗 The largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for AI models with fast, easy-to-use and efficient data manipulation tools

Choose datasets if…

• you want the more widely starred option (22.1k)
• you specifically need ai or computer-vision

Shares artificial-intelligence, llm, machine-learning, pytorch with inference.

Soup

MakazhanAlpamys/Soup

Fine-tune LLMs from one YAML. Layer streaming trains an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU.

Choose Soup if…

• you specifically need cli or consumer-gpu

Shares llm, machine-learning, pytorch, transformers with inference.

unsloth

unslothai/unsloth

Local UI to run and train LLMs and diffusion models. Supports GGUF, MLX, Qwen3.8, DeepSeek-V4, MiniMax-H3, Gemma 4, FLUX and more.

Choose unsloth if…

• you want the more widely starred option (79.0k)
• you specifically need agent or ai

Shares gemma, llm, qwen with inference.

ray

ray-project/ray

Ray is an AI compute engine. Ray consists of a core distributed runtime and a set of AI Libraries for accelerating ML workloads.

Choose ray if…

• you want the more widely starred option (44.2k)
• you specifically need data-science or deep-learning

Shares deployment, llm, machine-learning, pytorch with inference.

shimmy

Michael-A-Kuykendall/shimmy

⚡ Pure-Rust WebGPU inference engine — OpenAI-API compatible, GGUF native, runs on any GPU. No Python. No llama.cpp. Single binary.

Choose shimmy if…

• you would rather work in Rust than Python
• you specifically need api-server or command-line-tool

Shares llamacpp, machine-learning, transformers with inference.

ollama

ollama/ollama

Get up and running with Kimi-K2.6, GLM-5.2, MiniMax, DeepSeek, gpt-oss, Qwen, Gemma and other models.

Choose ollama if…

• you would rather work in Go than Python
• MIT License suits your use better than Apache License 2.0
• you want the more widely starred option (185.8k)
• you specifically need deepseek or gemma3

Shares gemma, glm, llm, qwen with inference.

kornia

kornia/kornia

🐍 Geometric Computer Vision Library for Spatial AI

Choose kornia if…

• you specifically need computer-vision or deep-learning

Shares artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, pytorch with inference.

stanza

stanfordnlp/stanza

Stanford NLP Python library for tokenization, sentence segmentation, NER, and parsing of many human languages

Choose stanza if…

• you specifically need corenlp or deep-learning

Shares artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, pytorch with inference.