Best Local LLMs You Can Run for Free in 2026

Running large language models locally on personal hardware is presented as a practical, private, and cheaper alternative to subscription-based cloud AI in 2026. The article highlights five models: Alibaba Cloud's Qwen 3.5 family, MiniMax M2.5 (about 230B total parameters, roughly 10B active), Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 (1T parameters, 32B active), Z.ai's GLM-5 (about 754B parameters, 40B active), and DeepSeek-V3.2 with its V3.2-Speciale variant. It also gives setup steps using Dappnode Core and the Ollama package from its Dappstore.