Absolutely there’s a difference. LLMs, when it comes to this specific task, are better. That’s why they’re being used here. It’s a job they are uniquely well suited to. They do indeed come with high hardware requirements, which is why you’re not forced to use them, and why they provide the option to offload the work to a cloud service.

Personally I would absolutely not want to ever feed my documents into an off-device model, but the point of self-hosted software is that it does what you tell it to and they absolutely should include letting you make bad decisions.