daari vs Ollama

Ollama runs a model. daari chooses a path. daari uses Ollama as the L3–L5 backend; it does not replace it.

	Ollama	daari
Job	Serve local GGUF/MLX-class models	Route each request to cache, tools, local, or frontier
Cache	None	L0 exact + L1 semantic
Non-AI work	Still a model call	Lt — git, lint, IDE tools
Clients	Ollama API / some IDE plugins	OpenAI + Anthropic + daari setup <client>
License	MIT	Apache 2.0

Pick Ollama if you only need “a model on localhost.”

Pick daari + Ollama if you already run Ollama and still watch Cursor send the same prompt to a frontier API.

ollama pull llama3.2:3b
pip install daari
daari serve

Second identical curl should show "tier": "L0". Docs: quickstart.