MLC Chat vs Sotto
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.
Sotto
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Sotto is a chat app for language models that run on your own device. There is no account, no server and no analytics. Your conversations stay in the app’s own container on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. TWO WAYS TO RUN A MODEL • Apple’s on-device foundation model. Nothing to download; start chatting straight away on a device that supports it. • Open-source models. Download a GGUF model from a curated catalog, or import a .gguf file you already have. Sotto runs it with llama.cpp, using Metal on device. Once a model is on the device, Sotto keeps working with the network off. TOOLS THE MODEL CAN CALL Twenty-five built-in tools run entirely on your device: dates and time zones, a calculator and unit converter, percentages and number bases, text rewriting, find-and-replace, extraction, sorting, word counts and diffs, JSON and CSV, descriptive statistics, encoding, hashing, random numbers, and a search of your own past chats. Four are on out of the box; the rest are one switch away. You can add two of your own: a web search that uses your own API key, or an HTTPS request you define. Both stay off until you set them up, and each asks for approval before it runs. MAC, IPHONE AND IPAD • A menu bar item on the Mac: ask a question from the status bar, reach your last five chats, and open any window in one click. • Compare two models side by side on the same prompt. • Personas: saved system prompts and sampling settings. A local-only persona never sees a tool that uses the network. • Export any conversation to Markdown or JSON. • Optional Face ID, Touch ID or passcode lock. PRIVACY Sotto’s developer collects nothing. No sign-in, no identifier, no usage statistics, no third-party SDK. The only outbound requests are a model download you start, an optional weekly check of the model catalog (off by default), and any tool you set up yourself. Settings › Privacy shows a live count of the bytes the app has actually sent. FREE Sotto is free. No in-app purchases, no subscription, no ads and no paid tier. A NOTE ON GENERATED TEXT Sotto runs models locally and does not filter, review or fact-check what they produce. Models invent things, get facts wrong, and can produce mature language or themes. Treat an answer as a draft and check anything that matters.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is iOS requirement: MLC Chat at 17.0 against Sotto's 26.5. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support 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.
| Parameter | MLC Chat | Sotto |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.2 (83 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 68.3% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 83 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 26.5 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 1.7 GB | 12 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Tianqi Chen | Eonix (Pvt) Ltd |
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
Sotto
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
MLC Chat
No in-app purchases
Sotto
No in-app purchases









