Cherry Studio Review: Desktop AI Hub with 300+ Assistants

I’ve got four AI chat apps pinned to my dock for different models. And switching between them? That gets old fast.

So when Cherry Studio crossed my radar — a desktop client wrapping every major LLM provider into one interface — it promised the consolidation I needed. At 47,414 GitHub stars, I had to try it.

What Is Cherry Studio?

Open-source desktop AI client with unified access to cloud LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek), web services (Claude, Perplexity, Poe), and local models (Ollama, LM Studio) — all inside one app. Plus 300+ pre-configured assistants, MCP support, and document handling for text, images, PDFs, and code.

But the real story is how well it pulls all that together. So I installed it on my Windows rig to find out.

Multi-LLM Without the Tab-Hopping

And the core experience is exactly what you’d hope for: pick your model from the sidebar, type your question, get an answer. Want to compare responses across models? Cherry Studio lets you run the same prompt against ChatGPT and Claude in split view simultaneously. That’s a game-changer if you do prompt engineering or cross-model validation.

Still, the breadth is what stands out. But most “multi-LLM” clients cover three or four cloud providers. Cherry Studio covers the full spectrum:

So I tested it against GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 back to back. Same prompt, split view, results in under 10 seconds. Pick a provider, paste your API key, done.

300+ Assistants — The Real Differentiator

But the headline feature is the assistants library. That’s over 300 pre-built assistants from “Code Reviewer” to “SQL Optimizer” to “Story Generator”, each with a system prompt and recommended model.

So I spent about 20 minutes browsing the catalog. But most are genuinely useful. The “Git Commit Message Generator” saved me the time I hate wasting on writing git commit messages. And the “Technical Blog Writer” wrote a solid first draft for my documentation piece in one shot — using a system prompt I’d have spent 15 minutes crafting.

You can create custom assistants with your own prompts and knowledge files. For teams with shared prompt templates, this replaces an entire Notion wiki. It’s a different take from AI agents like Nanobot, which focus on autonomous task execution rather than chat-based assistance.

Cherry Studio vs. the Competition

So where does it sit against the other major players?

Cherry Studio’s breadth of model support and 300+ assistants are clear advantages. Chatbox is simpler and MIT-licensed. LobeChat has more stars and a modern web architecture, but no enterprise tier. For a CLI-focused approach to unifying AI tools, Omnigent is worth a look too. And for a self-hosted enterprise platform, see our DocsGPT review.

What to Watch Out For

I can’t give an honest review without mentioning the rough edges. And there are a few worth noting.

First, the AGPL-3.0 license is restrictive. So for commercial use, that’s a non-starter without the paid Enterprise Edition. Still, the 1,187 open issues is high — not alarming for a project this popular, but worth checking.

And Cherry Studio is desktop-only right now. No web or mobile app yet. Though the roadmap mentions Android and iOS, as of today, you’re tied to a desktop machine.

Also, there’s a Chinese ecosystem tilt. Moonshot and Minimax alongside OpenAI tells you where the core user base is. Not a problem for English users — all Western providers work fine — but some UI labels default to Chinese.

The Bottom Line

So here’s my verdict: Cherry Studio is the most feature-complete open-source AI desktop client I’ve tried. The 300+ assistants and broadest model support set it apart from Chatbox and LobeChat. It’s not for everyone — the AGPL license and desktop-only limitation matter — but for anyone juggling multiple LLM providers who wants one app to rule them all, this is it.