Running a language model locally used to be a hobbyist experiment. In 2026, it's a viable engineering decision for a growing slice of real workloads — and the tooling has finally caught up. StorageReview just published a comprehensive roundup of what actually works, with one useful caveat upfront:
"Roughly a third of the tools you will find recommended in a search result today are dead, and most of the pages recommending them have not noticed."
That makes this kind of maintained, hardware-grounded list genuinely valuable. Here's what you need to know.
The hardware reality first
Before picking tools, pick your memory tier. This is the decision that determines what model class you can run:
