Alternatives to Dolly
17 tools that compete with or replace Dolly. Ranked by direct product-type match — not generic category overlap.
Why people look for alternatives to Dolly
The complaints that come up most often in public discussion — reviews, forums and community threads. Not our opinion, and not the vendor's marketing.
- Archived project, so no updates, support, or community feedback loops.
- Struggles with programming, math, and complex reasoning tasks.
- Lacks some abilities like well-formatted letter writing.
- Setup can be tricky on non-standard hardware (e.g., Mac M1 issues).
Drawn from 74 mentions across 6 sources · researched Sep 9, 2026.
In fairness: users also consistently praise fine-tune 12b model in ~30 min on a single a100 gpu, and open-source under apache 2.0 with code and weights available. A complaint list is not a verdict — see the full picture on the Dolly page.
Mistral
Mistral is the sovereign AI stack: frontier open-weight models you can self-host, fine-tune, or run in-region.
Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 coding model and MaaS platform deliver open-source SOTA front-end programming, 1M context, and autonomous agents.
Baichuan 7B
Baichuan-7B is a free 7B bilingual Chinese-English base LLM to fine-tune and serve on your own hardware.
Falcon LLM
Falcon LLM delivers Apache-2.0 open-weight language and multimodal models you can self-host, from hybrid Transformer-Mamba to Arabic ASR
LFM
LFM2.5 is Liquid AI's open-weight foundation model family for on-device AI — native text, vision, and audio inference on CPU, GPU, or NPU.
StableLM
StableLM: Stability AI's open-weight language model for self-hosted text and code generation
Baichuan Inc
Chinese medical LLM weights from 7B to 235B plus the 百小医 AI family-doctor app and free 海纳百川 M3 Plus API
AI21 Labs
AI21 Labs builds custom post-trained AI models and harness optimization for enterprises that need task-specific accuracy at lower cost
Naver HyperClova X
Korean enterprise LLM — consumer CLOVA X service ended April 2026
PaLM API
PaLM API gives Google Cloud developers safe, scalable access to Google's language models, with MakerSuite for prompt prototyping.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
Open-weight 35B Mixture-of-Experts model with roughly 3B active parameters per token, built for local agentic coding and reasoning.
Qwen3.6-27B
Alibaba's open-weight 27B model for agentic coding and image-plus-text reasoning, self-hosted under Apache 2.0.
HPT
HPT is an open-weight multimodal LLM family — HPT 1.5 Edge (~4B) and HPT 1.5 Air (8B on Llama 3) — for self-hosted vision-language
Cohere
Cohere delivers enterprise generative and retrieval AI you can deploy in your own VPC, on-prem, or via Model Vault.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek delivers free reasoning chat plus multimodal vision, with a usage-billed API for developers.
MiniMax
MiniMax M3 is a 1M-context, natively multimodal coding and agentic frontier model sold on a token subscription.
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview is Qwen's early-access flagship for agentic coding and multi-step tool orchestration.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best alternatives to Dolly?
We currently list 17 alternatives to Dolly: Mistral, Zhipu AI, Baichuan 7B, Falcon LLM, LFM. Each is ranked by direct product-type match rather than generic category overlap.
How do you choose which Dolly alternatives to show?
Alternatives are ranked by direct product-type match — tools that do the same job — not by shared category tags. Every listed tool is independently re-verified on a continuous cycle.