The deciding difference is operational: Ollama can run on infrastructure you control, Google Vertex AI cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered.
Claude and Gemini under GCP billing, IAM and regional controls.
Open-weight models on your own machine. Nothing leaves the box.
| Google Vertex AI | Ollama | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary | Open source |
| Pricing | usage based | open source |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Languages | TypeScript, Python | TypeScript, Python |
| Install | — | brew install ollama |
| Keys required | GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT, GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS | None |
The deciding difference is operational: Ollama can run on infrastructure you control, Google Vertex AI cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered. Google Vertex AI: Claude and Gemini under GCP billing, IAM and regional controls. Ollama: Open-weight models on your own machine. Nothing leaves the box.
Google Vertex AI is a hosted service only. Ollama can run on your own infrastructure.
Google Vertex AI 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/vertex-vs-ollama