The deciding difference is operational: Ollama can run on infrastructure you control, Anthropic cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered.
Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Strong tool use and long-horizon agentic work.
Enable prompt caching on the system prompt and tool definitions — it is the single biggest cost lever.
Open-weight models on your own machine. Nothing leaves the box.
| Anthropic | Ollama | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary | Open source |
| Pricing | usage based | open source |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Languages | TypeScript, Python | TypeScript, Python |
| Install | npm install @anthropic-ai/sdk | brew install ollama |
| Keys required | ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | None |
The deciding difference is operational: Ollama can run on infrastructure you control, Anthropic cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered. Anthropic: Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Strong tool use and long-horizon agentic work. Ollama: Open-weight models on your own machine. Nothing leaves the box.
Anthropic is a hosted service only. Ollama can run on your own infrastructure.
Anthropic is proprietary (usage based). Ollama is open source (open source).
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/compare/anthropic-vs-ollama