Hugging Face Alternatives for Downloading Models (2026)

The best Hugging Face alternatives for downloading models are ModelScope, Ollama’s own library, Kaggle Models and the labs’ own pages. Each one covers only part of the models people run at home. The most reliable backup is a copy on your own drive, made now while every source still works. No shutdown has been announced, so think of a backup plan as cheap insurance.

Hugging Face Hub is the website where many labs post open-weight models, which are AI models anyone can download and run. Below is where else the models in our catalog lived on Nov 14, 2026, the commands to get them, and what stops working in common apps if the Hub goes away.

Why people are asking

Nvidia announced a plan to buy Hugging Face in September 2026 for $12.9 billion. It is set to close in the first half of 2027, per TechCrunch on Nov 12, 2026. TechCrunch also reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left this week, with Colette Kress as interim CEO. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote “we’ll keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever.”

Reuters reported on Oct 28, 2026 that the DOJ asked how the deal would affect AI competition. No lawsuit has been filed. Nvidia says Hugging Face will keep supporting rival chips, clouds and software. Those promises are not binding conditions. No change to the terms of use has been announced (summary of the Reuters report).

A blogger urged people to pull models “while you still can.” Delangue replied: “We’re not going anywhere!” Nvidia has pledged that uploads and downloads will continue (Qazinform). Nobody has announced a Hugging Face shut down.

Where each model is outside Hugging Face

We checked each source on Nov 14, 2026. “Lab account” means the repo sits under the lab’s own organization. “Other account” means a copy we could not tie to the lab. “Not found” means we looked and it wasn’t there. “Not checked” means we didn’t look.

ModelScope has the big Chinese models under the labs’ own names. Of the models we checked, the big Chinese models (Kimi K3.1 Pro, GLM-5.3 Flash, MiniMax M3.1 Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) are cloud-only on Ollama. They run on Ollama’s servers, so Ollama is no backup for them on your own machine.

ModelScope

ModelScope is Alibaba’s model hub. It also has a China site at modelscope.cn. In the ModelScope vs Hugging Face question, ModelScope is the closest match. It has the same kind of repos, plus a command-line tool.

Watch the organization names. Zhipu AI is ZhipuAI on ModelScope and zai-org on Hugging Face. MiniMax is MiniMax on ModelScope and MiniMaxAI on Hugging Face.

The Western models on ModelScope sit under accounts we could not tie to the labs. An automated account made several of them. openai-mirror is a mirror account that does not belong to OpenAI. These copies are usable, but check the file hashes against the lab’s published ones when you can. A hash is a short fingerprint of a file that changes if the file changes.

Some community quants are there too. A quant is a smaller copy of a model with its numbers stored at lower precision. We found copies from unsloth, mlx-community and lmstudio-community, such as unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF, unsloth/GLM-5.3-Flash-GGUF, unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF, mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-4bit and lmstudio-community/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF. They look auto-synced, so they may stop updating if the source does. We did not find bartowski/Qwen_Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF or unsloth/Kimi-K3.1-Pro-GGUF.

We tested this with modelscope 1.40.3 (install docs):

pip install modelscope
modelscope download Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --local-dir ./Qwen3.8-27B
modelscope download unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF --include "*Q4_K_M*" --local-dir ./qwen3.8-27b-gguf

modelscope download --help also lists --exclude and --revision.

Ollama’s own library

ollama pull for a library model downloads from Ollama’s own registry. It does not touch Hugging Face. That makes it a real backup for the models with local tags in the table:

ollama pull qwen3.8:27b
ollama pull gpt-oss:20b

A :cloud tag is different. It runs on Ollama’s servers and needs an Ollama account (docs). Pulls that start with hf.co/, such as ollama run hf.co/{username}/{repository}, come straight from Hugging Face (docs). Those would break with it.

Kaggle Models

Kaggle Models is Google’s model site. We found Gemma 4, older Qwen 3, DeepSeek R1, Mistral and Llama 3.3 there. We did not find gpt-oss, Qwen3.8 or DeepSeek V4 Flash. You need a Kaggle account and API token (kagglehub). Copy the handle from the model page, then:

# pip install kagglehub
import kagglehub
path = kagglehub.model_download('<owner>/<model>/<framework>/<variation>', output_dir='./models')
print(path)

The labs themselves

Some labs offer their own downloads. Meta says you can get Llama “directly from Meta or one of our download partners: Hugging Face or Kaggle” (Llama docs). Mistral lists direct downloads with md5 sums for older models, such as Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3, Mixtral, Codestral 22B, Mistral Nemo and Mistral Large 2 (mistral-inference README). Newer models like Mistral Small 4 are not on that list.

Mistral has also shipped by torrent. It posted magnet links for Mistral 7B in September 2023 and Mixtral 8x7B on Dec 8, 2023. That shows a lab can ship without a hub. Watch each lab’s GitHub page and blog, since that is where they say where the weights live.

Cloud catalogs, for teams already on a cloud

AWS, Azure and Google Vertex AI Model Garden mostly run models on their own servers. Google’s Model Garden SDK lists both “Deploy an open model” and “Export open model weights.” It needs a Google Cloud project, so it is not a home-rig route.

Keep your own copies

This route does not depend on any hub. Download the models you use now, with the hf command (CLI guide). Older guides use huggingface-cli; the current command is hf.

curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash   # or: pip install huggingface_hub
hf download Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --local-dir ./Qwen3.8-27B
hf download unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF --include "*Q4_K_M*" --local-dir ./qwen3.8-27b-gguf
hf cache verify unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF --local-dir ./qwen3.8-27b-gguf

Without --local-dir, files go to ~/.cache/huggingface/hub. Set HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 to use only cached files with no network calls (env vars).

Know what to save:

• A GGUF is the single-file model format used by llama.cpp, LM Studio and Ollama. Big ones come as numbered split files. Keep every part.
• Safetensors is the file format labs use for full-size weights. MLX is Apple’s machine learning framework, and MLX models are folders too. For these folders, keep the config, tokenizer and chat-template files along with the weights.
• Keep the model card (README) and the LICENSE.
• Write down the source repo and revision. If the hub shows file hashes, record them.
• Store copies on an external drive.

How much disk you need

These are our catalog’s Q4 file sizes. Q4 means about 4 bits per number.

The full-size safetensors folder is larger than these. Disk size is not the memory you need to run a model. My Rig checks fit for your own hardware, using our fit rule. For gpt-oss-120b hardware, see the cheapest way to run it locally.

Point your apps at local files

• Ollama keeps models in ~/.ollama/models on macOS, /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models on Linux and C:\Users\%username%\.ollama\models on Windows. Set OLLAMA_MODELS to use an external drive (FAQ). On Linux, the ollama user needs read and write access to that folder.
• To load a GGUF into Ollama, write a Modelfile with FROM /path/to/file.gguf (or FROM /path/to/model-*.gguf for split files), then run ollama create my-model and ollama run my-model (import docs).
• llama.cpp loads a local file with -m /path/to/model.gguf. Add --offline to block network access.
• LM Studio runs fully offline once you have files (docs). Add a GGUF with lms import <path/to/model.gguf>, or place it at ~/.lmstudio/models/publisher/model/model-file.gguf (import docs).
• MLX on a Mac takes a local folder: mlx_lm.generate --model ./Qwen3.8-27B-4bit --prompt "hello" (mlx-lm). For choosing a machine, see Mac vs PC for local LLMs.

What breaks if Hugging Face goes down

hf-mirror.com says it mirrors the huggingface.co domain as a public project for developers in China. llama.cpp’s MODEL_ENDPOINT variable can point -hf at another site that speaks the Hugging Face API (docs). We have not tested ModelScope that way.

FAQ

Is Hugging Face shutting down?

No shutdown has been announced. The CEO said “We’re not going anywhere!” and Nvidia has pledged that downloads will continue.

What is the Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition?

Nvidia plans to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal is set to close in the first half of 2027. The DOJ has asked questions, but there is no lawsuit.

Where can I download local LLM models without Hugging Face?

ModelScope for Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax and LongCat. Ollama’s library for models with local tags. Kaggle for Gemma 4. See the table above for each model.

ModelScope vs Hugging Face: which should I use?

Use Hugging Face while it works. Keep ModelScope as the backup for the models it carries. Check file hashes for copies under accounts the lab doesn’t run.

Can I download models without Hugging Face in LM Studio?

Not from its search. Download the GGUF elsewhere, then add it with lms import.

Do my downloaded models stop working if Hugging Face goes down?

No. Local files keep working in llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio and MLX. Only new downloads from Hugging Face stop.