Cherry Studio
Cross-platform desktop LLM client with 300+ assistants, MCP support, and document processing.
About
Cherry Studio bundles smart chat, autonomous agents, and more than 300 preconfigured assistants into a desktop client for Windows, macOS, and Linux, with custom assistant creation on top. It connects to cloud providers such as OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic as well as local models through Ollama and LM Studio, and it acts as a Model Context Protocol client so external MCP tool servers plug directly into conversations, with an MCP marketplace for discovery. Document handling accepts text, images, Office files, and PDFs, and the app adds WebDAV backup, Mermaid diagram rendering, code syntax highlighting, global search, topic management, translation tools, a selection assistant, and a drag-and-drop interface. Installation is a standard desktop installer with no GPU needed; local model use only requires a separate Ollama or LM Studio setup. The community edition is AGPL-3.0, commercial use is permitted under those terms, and a paid commercial license plus an enterprise edition with centralized model management are sold separately. At 49.1k GitHub stars it was among the fastest growing desktop LLM clients of 2025.
Should you use Cherry Studio?
Pick it when
Pick Cherry Studio when you want one desktop app that mixes cloud and local models with MCP tool servers, Office and PDF document handling, and a large library of ready assistants, without running any server.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need a browser-accessible tool shared by a team; Open WebUI or LibreChat run as servers with accounts. If you only want a quick keyed chat window, Chatbox or NextChat are lighter, and NextChat is MIT rather than AGPL.
Alternatives to Cherry Studio
- Chatbox
Simpler, with iOS and Android apps alongside desktop, but a lighter feature set than Cherry Studio's assistant library and MCP marketplace.
- Lobe Chat
Self-hosted web workspace with agent marketplace, knowledge bases, and team workspaces reachable from any browser, but you deploy and run it, with a database for persistence.
- NextChat
MIT licensed and only about 5 MB as a Tauri app, lighter and more permissive, but far fewer built-in tools and document features.
- AnythingLLM
MIT licensed desktop or Docker app built around document workspaces with a vector database, a better fit when chatting over a file collection is the main job.
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Details
- Category
- UI & Chat Interfaces
- Price
- Freemium
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Beginner (1/5)
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026