Ollama vs vLLM vs SGLang: What Is the Best Open Model Server?

The Decision Brief

Your team wants to run an open model on its own hardware and needs to choose the server software. Published benchmark charts do not settle that decision. Each engine has a chart that says it wins. Those charts measure different things, and the GPU comparisons come from other people's tests.

On October 9, 2026, we tested Ollama 0.40.1 at its default parallelism setting on one Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB of unified memory. Four simultaneous hermes3:8b requests finished one after another. The fourth finished at 8.3 seconds on a job that took 2.1 seconds alone. Our experiment covered three models on that machine. Raising Ollama's parallelism was outside the test. We did not test vLLM or SGLang ourselves.

The full piece supplies the Prefix Probe results for three models and a five-case procedure for testing your own traffic. It sets out a trial order for four usage situations. The benchmark analysis explains what Winder.AI's H100 and Red Hat's A100 tests establish, including who sells what.

The evidence, the probe procedure and the trial order are below for PRO members. View PRO plans, $10 monthly or $99 annually.