Aider is a specialized AI coding assistant designed for pair programming with integrated git workflows, while Ollama is a local LLM runtime that lets you run any open-source language model on your machine. Aider requires an API key for cloud models, whereas Ollama runs models entirely offline.
Aider vs Ollama — Side-by-side comparison on A Versus B
Choose Aider if you want a purpose-built coding assistant with git workflows, automatic commit messages, and access to the most capable frontier models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Choose Ollama if you prioritize privacy, offline operation, zero costs, and want full control over which open-source models run on your hardware.
Command-line AI pair programmer with automatic git integration for code editing
Local large language model runtime for running open-source models offline on consumer hardware.
Structured comparison data for Aider vs Ollama with 156 attributes.
Code Generation Accuracy (HumanEval Benchmark)
Monthly Operating Cost (5,000 token average session)
Data Privacy (0=external servers, 1=local only)
Average Response Time for Code Suggestion
Typical Code Generation Quality (Subjective Rating)
Total Cost of Ownership (12 months, 1M daily tokens)
Inference Latency (7B model, first token)
Model Inference Speed (Llama 2 7B on RTX 4090)
Throughput (tokens/second, batch size 32)
Setup Time (from download to first inference)
Multimodal Capabilities (Vision, Image Gen)
Privacy Level (0=cloud-only, 100=fully local)
Inference Throughput (RTX 4090, Llama 2 13B)
Typical Response Quality (Reasoning Tasks)
Aider vs Ollama — Attribute Category Vocabulary
Taxonomy of attribute categories used to classify comparison data for Aider vs Ollama.
Aider requires minimal disk space (45MB+ for CLI). Ollama requires downloading model files (4GB for Mistral 7B up to 110GB+ for larger models). If storage is constrained, Aider with cloud APIs is vastly more space-efficient.
Ollama is superior for privacy. All model execution happens locally with zero data sent to external servers. Aider, when using cloud API models (Claude, GPT-4), sends your code to external services unless you configure it with a local Ollama instance.
Ollama costs $0/year. Aider costs approximately $300-600/year assuming typical development usage (~$25-50/month on API calls). However, you can reduce Aider's cost by using it exclusively with Ollama's free local models.
Partially. Ollama provides the underlying LLM capability, but it lacks Aider's specialized coding features like git integration, staged editing, file management, and conversation context. Many developers use Ollama with other tools (VS Code extensions, custom scripts) to replicate some of Aider's functionality.
Yes. Aider explicitly supports Ollama as a local model provider. You can run `aider --model ollama/llama2` or any other Ollama model, combining Aider's git integration and coding features with Ollama's offline-capable models.