Ollama can’t talk to OpenAI / Anthropic / etc. LLM gives you a single interface that can talk to both hosted and local models.

It also logs everything you do to a SQLite database, which is great for further analysis.

I use LLM and Ollama together quite a bit, because Ollama are really good at getting new models working and their server keeps those models in memory between requests.

I haven't used Ollama, but from what I've seen, it seems to operate at a different level of abstraction compared to `llm`. I use `llm` to access both remote and local models through its plugin ecosystem[1]. One of the plugins allows you to use Ollama-served local models. This means you can use the same CLI interface with Ollama[2], as well as with OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, llamafile, llamacpp, mlc, and others. I select different models for different purposes. Recently, I've switched my default from OpenAI to Anthropic quite seamlessly.

[1] - https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/plugins/directory.html#pl... [2] - https://github.com/taketwo/llm-ollama

The llm CLI is much more unixy, letting you pipe data in and out easily. It can use hosted and local models, including ollama.