Open-source LLMs 3

LLM tooling has exploded alongside the models themselves, and the category now spans several distinct problem areas. Deployment and serving tools like PeriFlow and Dstack help teams run models efficiently at scale. Evaluation and observability tools like UpTrain and AIWatch track model quality, drift, and cost over time. Memory and retrieval tools like Cognee add persistent context or RAG capabilities to LLM applications. When choosing, the key questions are infrastructure fit (cloud, on-prem, or hybrid), model compatibility (OpenAI-only vs. open-weight models), and whether the tool addresses your actual bottleneck, whether that is latency, cost, accuracy, or developer velocity. Pricing structures vary: some tools charge per token processed, others per seat or per API call. Open-source options exist across most sub-categories, which is worth considering for teams with engineering capacity to self-host.