Training and fine-tuning

Tools to fine-tune, train or distill models on your own data and GPUs, from LoRA scripts to full training stacks.

llamafactory leads with 74, ahead of minimind (52). 2 projects ranked by score. Updated from public GitHub data.

The ranking

Training and fine-tuning: full ranking
RankProjectAdoptionFreshnessMaintenanceEasy to runAgent-readyScore
1llamafactoryFine-tuning toolkit for 100+ LLMs with a CLI and Gradio web UI Live demo ↗ (opens in a new tab)75.4k starsApache-2.0last commit Oct 20269110038–5574 out of 100
2minimindTrain a 64M-parameter LLM from scratch in plain PyTorch Live demo ↗ (opens in a new tab)63.7k starsApache-2.0last commit Sep 2026388551–052 out of 100

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Reviews

174 out of 100

llamafactory

Fine-tuning toolkit for 100+ LLMs with a CLI and Gradio web UI

Live demo ↗ (opens in a new tab)75.4k starsApache-2.0last commit Oct 2026

LlamaFactory fine-tunes language and multimodal models through YAML-configured CLI runs or the LLaMA Board Gradio UI. It covers pre-training, SFT, reward modeling, PPO, DPO, KTO and ORPO, with full-tuning, freeze-tuning, LoRA and 2 to 8-bit QLoRA. Trained models can be served through an OpenAI-style API using vLLM or SGLang workers.

Strengths

  • Broad method coverage: SFT, PPO, DPO, KTO, ORPO, LoRA, QLoRA via AQLM/AWQ/GPTQ/HQQ/EETQ
  • Supports GaLore, BAdam, APOLLO, Muon, DoRA, PiSSA, plus Unsloth and Liger Kernel speedups
  • Covers multimodal and audio models such as Qwen3-VL, LLaVA and Qwen2-Audio
  • Runs on NVIDIA, AMD ROCm and Ascend NPU, with hosted Colab and PAI-DSW notebooks

Weaknesses

  • Official documentation is marked WIP in the README
  • No VRAM or RAM figures in the visible README; hardware requirements unknown here
  • Web UI is for training and chat, not a production serving layer
  • Many optional backends (vLLM, SGLang, Unsloth, KTransformers) add install complexity
  • GPU required
  • Docker + Compose
  • Needs PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, Gradio, vLLM (optional), SGLang (optional)
  • Models: LLaMA, LLaVA, Mistral, Mixtral-MoE, Qwen3
252 out of 100

minimind

Train a 64M-parameter LLM from scratch in plain PyTorch

Live demo ↗ (opens in a new tab)63.7k starsApache-2.0last commit Sep 2026

MiniMind is a from-scratch implementation of a small Qwen3-style decoder-only LLM (64M dense, 198M-A64M MoE) with each training stage written in native PyTorch: pretrain, SFT, LoRA, DPO, PPO/GRPO/CISPO, agentic RL and distillation. It ships datasets, a 6,400-token tokenizer, an OpenAI-compatible server and a Streamlit chat UI. The README states one SFT epoch takes about 2 hours on a single 3090.

Strengths

  • Core algorithms (LoRA, DPO, PPO/GRPO) written in plain PyTorch, not wrapped from trl or peft
  • Open datasets for each stage, with mini variants (1.2GB pretrain, 1.6GB SFT) for quick runs
  • Weights convert to transformers, llama.cpp, vllm and ollama; ollama and vllm usage is documented
  • Checkpoint resume, DDP and DeepSpeed multi-GPU, wandb or swanlab logging

Weaknesses

  • Models are tiny (64M), so output quality is far below mainstream LLMs
  • README is primarily in Chinese; the English version is a separate file
  • Training data is largely synthetic and distilled, with mixed source licenses
  • Native MoE training is about 50% slower than dense, per the README
  • GPU optional
  • Needs PyTorch, transformers, streamlit (optional WebUI), swanlab or wandb (optional)
  • Models: minimind-3 (64M), minimind-3-moe (198M-A64M), minimind2 series, Transformers format, llama.cpp

Written from each project's README and checked facts. Spot something wrong? Report it on GitHub (opens in a new tab).