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Phi-3.5 Mini

Reviewed 2026-06-16
Microsoft (Ollama)ollama/phi3.5-mini
Context
128K
Price
Free
Tooling
2/5
Deploy
Local (self-hosted)

Best for

  • Private, offline use on your own hardware

Skip if

  • You need heavy tool calling or agents
  • You want a managed, zero-setup API

Capability scores

Tool calling2/5
Multi-step reasoning2/5

Specifications

Context window
128K tokens
VRAM
~4GB
License
mit
Pricing
Free to run · needs ~4GB GPU
Deployment
Local (self-hosted)

Our take

Phi-3.5 Mini from Microsoft (Ollama) offers a 128K-token context window and is well-suited to general-purpose tasks. It runs on your own hardware, so there is no per-token cost and your data stays private (plan for roughly 4GB of VRAM).

Watch for the trade-offs: tool calling is limited; there is no managed API — you run and maintain it yourself.

Compare to

CodeLlama 34B
Meta (Ollama)
16K context · Free to run · needs ~20GB GPU
DeepSeek Coder V2 Lite
DeepSeek (Ollama)
128K context · Free to run · needs ~10GB GPU
DeepSeek-R1 32B (Qwen distill)
DeepSeek (Ollama)
128K context · Free to run · needs ~20GB GPU
Best LLMs for a 24GB GPU →Best LLMs for an 8GB GPU →Best Local LLMs for Hermes Agent →Local & Open-Weight LLMs →

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