Sourcegraph Cody vs Ollama
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Sourcegraph Cody and Ollama.
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Verdict: Ollama wins
Ollama scores 4.6/5, edging out Sourcegraph Cody at 3.5/5. Developers and privacy-conscious teams who want open-weight models running on their own hardware with a clean local API, and who are comfortable in a terminal.
Sourcegraph Cody AI coding assistant with entire codebase context | Ollama Run large language models locally | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.5 (1 review) | 4.6 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | free |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best For | Large engineering organizations already running Sourcegraph Enterprise that want an AI assistant grounded in their full multi-repo codebase and can commit to an enterprise contract. | Developers and privacy-conscious teams who want open-weight models running on their own hardware with a clean local API, and who are comfortable in a terminal. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierteam featuresbyok | api accessopen sourcefree tier |
| Visit Sourcegraph Cody → | Visit Ollama → |
Sourcegraph Cody
Pros
- + Cross-repository context via Sourcegraph's search index — in my testing its citations landed on the real symbols across two repos, where file-scoped assistants hallucinate call sites
- + Context filters actually work: I excluded a repository and confirmed questions stopped drawing from it, a verifiable admin control
- + Runs in VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio (experimental), web and CLI, so it fits mixed-IDE teams
- + Enterprise deployment options including single-tenant, with a stated no-model-training policy in Sourcegraph's AI terms
Cons
- - No self-serve access of any kind since 23 July 2025 — no free tier, no trial, and a $16,000 minimum annual contract on the only plan Sourcegraph publishes
- - Per-seat pricing is unpublished; the widely quoted $59/user/month could not be verified on Sourcegraph's own pages
- - Autocomplete latency in a large monorepo was slow enough to interrupt my flow in testing, varying with indexed context size
- - The context advantage depends on your repositories being indexed on the Sourcegraph instance — without that setup it behaves like cheaper assistants
Ollama
Pros
- + Local inference is free and unlimited — cost is hardware and electricity, and prompts never leave the machine (OLLAMA_NO_CLOUD=1 disables the cloud path entirely)
- + OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints at localhost:11434 meant existing SDK code worked for me after a single base_url change, including JSON-schema structured output
- + Install-to-first-chat took about two minutes on my M-series Mac with a quantized 8B model, and ollama ps shows the GPU/CPU split honestly
- + Huge ecosystem: ~183k GitHub stars, setup docs for 20+ agents and editors, official Python and JS libraries
- + v0.40.x MLX default made prompt processing measurably faster on Apple Silicon in my runs, and releases ship every few days
Cons
- - Memory-tiered default context window truncates long inputs out of the box — I had to raise num_ctx explicitly in a coding-agent setup
- - Quality ceiling is your hardware: a local 7B quant visibly trails frontier hosted models on hard reasoning
- - No end-user polish — quantization, context sizing, and memory management stay your problem, and CPU-only machines run slowly
- - Fast release cadence creates churn for pinned deployments (e.g. v0.34.1 moved GGUF creation out to llama.cpp tooling)
- - Cloud Team plan pricing conflicts across sources ($500/mo flat vs $25/seat with 5-seat minimum); Max signups reported paused at times
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Sourcegraph Cody or Ollama?▼
Ollama scores higher at 4.6/5 vs 3.5/5 for Sourcegraph Cody, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Sourcegraph Cody and Ollama?▼
Sourcegraph Cody: Cody is Sourcegraph's AI coding assistant, answering questions and writing code with context from an entire codebase. Ollama: Ollama enables you to run open-source large language models locally on your machine, providing privacy and offline access to AI capabilities.
Is Sourcegraph Cody or Ollama more affordable?▼
Sourcegraph Cody starts at €0/mo, Ollama starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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