QVAC vs Cactus

Key differences

QVAC and Cactus are both built to run local AI on phones and wearables. Cactus ships its own kernels and quantisation rather than wrapping llama.cpp, publishes bindings for Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, React Native, Python and Rust, and covers text, vision, transcription, embeddings and RAG. QVAC runs on Fabric, a llama.cpp fork, and exposes JavaScript, TypeScript and Python.

The licences differ in scope. The Cactus engine is source-available: its free grant covers individuals, education, non-profits, and organisations with both under two million dollars in funding and under two million in annual revenue, and crossing either threshold calls for a commercial licence within thirty days. The cactus-react-native package separately declares MIT, so the engine LICENSE file is the governing document. The QVAC SDK is Apache 2.0 and Fabric is MIT, with no thresholds attached.

The architectures point in different directions. Cactus is hybrid edge-cloud, with cloud handoff as a designed path when a device cannot carry a request. QVAC keeps work on devices and can delegate to another device over an encrypted peer-to-peer link. Whether a request may leave the device decides which one fits.

This page compares Cactus v2.1.0, released 17 August 2026, against QVAC 0.18.2, meaning the SDK together with the Fabric inference engine at v10297.1.1. Every row was checked against the project's own documentation and release notes on 4 September 2026. Both projects move quickly, so check the current release before you make a decision on either one.