Pace vs RCLI

Choosing between Pace and RCLI?

RCLI runs fully on-device, and it's open source under a MIT license. It calls itself "Talk to your Mac, query your docs — on-device voice AI + RAG, no cloud required.".

Where Pace differs: RCLI's MetalRT engine hits sub-200ms latency and 550 tok/s — a serious performance benchmark Pace should measure against. RCLI has local RAG Pace doesn't ship. Pace has the tier picker, trust surfaces, and MCP integration RCLI lacks. 1,523 stars — the most-trafficked on-device competitor.

The full breakdown is below — what RCLI is genuinely good at, its stack, and the honest line on where Pace diverges, including where Pace is behind. For the whole field in one place, see every macOS voice agent compared.

RCLI

github.com/RunanywhereAI/RCLI

Talk to your Mac, query your docs — on-device voice AI + RAG, no cloud required. — RunanywhereAI

STT · Local — Zipformer (streaming), Whisper base.en, Parakeet TDT 0.6B Reasoner · Local — Qwen3 0.6B/4B, Llama 3.2 3B, LFM2.5 1.2B (MetalRT or llama.cpp) TTS · Local — Piper, KittenTTS, Matcha, Kokoro (28 voices) Screen · yes

What it's good at

  • Sub-200ms end-to-end voice latency via proprietary MetalRT GPU engine (up to 550 tok/s).
  • Local RAG over documents with hybrid vector + BM25 retrieval.
  • 20+ models across LLM, STT, TTS, VLM, VAD, and embeddings — all on-device.

Where Pace differs

RCLI's MetalRT engine hits sub-200ms latency and 550 tok/s — a serious performance benchmark Pace should measure against. RCLI has local RAG Pace doesn't ship. Pace has the tier picker, trust surfaces, and MCP integration RCLI lacks. 1,523 stars — the most-trafficked on-device competitor.

Rechecked June 2026.
If RCLI shipped something I missed or got cheaper since, email me and I'll update this page.

Pace is $29 once, fully on-device, and free to try on Apple Intelligence.

Get Pace

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