The short version
Self-hosted means the daemon runs on a machine you own and nothing leaves it unless you say so. Cloud means the console, the vault, and the audit trail live on a hosted service, and the agent talks to it over an encrypted channel.
Self-hosted
- All prompts and logs stay on your hardware.
- Run Ollama locally for $0 and zero keys.
- Full control over the runtime and the network.
- You maintain it, patch it, and back it up.
Cloud
- Access the dashboard from anywhere.
- A managed encrypted vault for your provider keys.
- Budgets, approvals, and audit trail without running a server.
- The project is open source, so you can move later.
The hybrid most people land on
Run the agent locally on a machine you trust, and connect it to the hosted console for overview. The heavy work stays on your hardware; the control plane lives in the cloud.
Cost and lock-in
Both are the same open-source codebase under MIT. Self-hosting costs you hardware and time; the hosted console has a free tier and a paid plan for fleets. Nothing about the data format is proprietary.