I have a checklist. It exists because I have watched people, good engineers, download the wrong model enough times. Five things, in the order that actually matters. Model pages all blur together after a while. Impressive numbers, vague claims, a download button. This cuts through.

First, hardware. Can you run it? Check VRAM at the quantization you will actually use, plus headroom for your context length. A model you cannot run is not a candidate. Second, license. The one people skip and regret. If anything you build might ship commercially, the license decides whether you can. Apache 2.0 and MIT are nearly no-strings. Community licenses add conditions you need to read. Check before you build on it, not after. Trust me on the ordering here.

Third, context window. How much the model can consider at once: long documents, big codebases, long conversations. Our open source LLM context window comparison tracks all 200 models because it is a top-three filter for real use and nobody checks it early enough. Fourth, benchmarks, read skeptically. Specific capabilities, specific conditions. Good for shortlisting. Useless as a final verdict.

Fifth, maintenance. Is the model family alive? Active projects get fixes, better quantizations, community tooling, and better answers when you are stuck at midnight. Abandoned ones get stale. Run all five and the list of 200 becomes a list of five. That is the whole trick. Most models eliminate themselves the moment you apply real constraints.

Doing this for a company? There is a sixth check: who keeps it running? A private AI setup for business means documented installs, monitored uptime, someone to call. That is what our on-premise LLM setup consulting SaaS covers. Our open source LLM comparison filters on all of it, hardware, license, context, benchmarks, maintenance. And our LLM license comparison for commercial use sits next to the specs, so the legal question takes ten minutes instead of ten tabs. Want it running privately without the DIY? I do private AI setup for businesses at privateaiagent.fyi. Your data never leaves.