MLC Chat vs Offline Base
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
MLC Chat
Engage in conversations with open language models directly on your iPad or iPhone. Once a model is downloaded, all interactions occur locally, ensuring privacy and offline functionality without internet access. This app is designed for non-commercial use, allowing you to run various open-source language models on your device.
- Local AI model chat
- Offline functionality
- No internet required
- Privacy-focused
- Open-source project integration
- Downloadable language models
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MLC Chat lets users chat with open language models locally on ipads and iphones. After a model is downloaded to the app, everything runs locally without server support, and it works without internet connections do not record any information. Because the models run locally, it only works for the devices with sufficient VRAM depending on the models being used. MLC Chat is part of open source project MLC LLM, with allows any language model to be deployed natively on a diverse set of hardware backends and native applications. MLC Chat is a runtime that runs different open model architectures on your phone. The app is intended for non-commercial purposes. It allows you to run open-language models downloaded from the internet. Each model can be subject to its respective licenses.
Offline Base
This private AI assistant runs entirely on your iPhone, offering offline conversations and AI inference without cloud data transfer. It supports local chat, voice input, document attachments, and Markdown responses, keeping your data secure on your device.
- On-device AI inference
- Offline conversations
- Voice input
- Document attachments
- Markdown responses
- Privacy-focused
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Base is a private AI assistant that runs directly on your iPhone. After the initial model download, conversations and AI inference can run fully on-device without sending your prompts to a cloud AI provider. Base supports local chat, voice input, read aloud, document attachments, Markdown responses, and offline use. Your conversations and files stay on your device.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Offline Base at 5.0 against MLC Chat's 4.2. Offline Base also leads on review sentiment (100% vs 68%) and update cadence (every 4 days vs every 2 months). MLC Chat's advantage is ratings volume (78 vs 1). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Offline Base holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.2. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: MLC Chat has 78 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 68% of MLC Chat's written reviews are positive against 100% of Offline Base's.
MLC Chat ships an update every 2 months, Offline Base every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 14, 2026 and October 9, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | MLC Chat | Offline Base |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.2 (78 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 68.3% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 78 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 1.7 GB | 29 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Tianqi Chen | Offline Base |
Customer experience
MLC Chat
Offline Base
Bugs and requests
MLC Chat
Reported bugs
17 issues- Phi model crashes on iOS 26.0.1 17 Pro Max
- App crashes on iPad Pro 4th Gen, iPadOs 17.7
- RedPajama model crashes app on initialization
- Update is extremely slow
- Download model button disabled in new version
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- RedPajama model crashes, custom model download removed
- App closes when hitting send on iPhone 13
- Conversation resets when app is backgrounded
- Vicuna and Mistral 7B models cause crashes
- Some 7b q4f16/q4f32 models crash on iPhone 15 Pro
- App crashes on iPhone 13 mini
- Cannot load other models from URL
- Crash on iPhone 12
- Severe heating and frequency reduction on A15
- Low VRAM failed initialization on 3GB LP DDR4X phone
- Cannot run 4bit model on iPhone 15 with 8GB RAM
- Loading models from HF MLC official Repo causes crashes
Requested features
14 requests- Ability to import custom models (from URL/Hugging Face)
- Support for more specific models (DeepSeek, Phi-2, Gemma 2B/7B, MoE Mixtral 8x7B, LLaVA)
- History of conversations
- iOS shortcuts support
- Ability to export entire responses
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- Information on VRAM requirements per phone/model
- Ability to change system message/create custom profiles
- Ability to edit responses and system prompt
- Add coffee support
- Delete downloaded models
- Change settings per model (repetition penalties, temperature)
- How-to guide for importing/recompiling LLMs
- Estimate model compatibility before download
- Support for CN and ZH languages
Offline Base
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
MLC Chat
No in-app purchases
Offline Base
No in-app purchases
