Both options are valid and have their pros and cons!

Running your tests on local browsers is indeed faster and is often enough for small projects. In general, it's a good idea to use local browsers if you have very few browsers to run tests on, no visual checks and don't need to run tens of tests in parallel.

Remote browser grid offers the following advantages:

• Consistency when performing visual checks. This is a big deal, because screenshots of a page will be different in different environments even if you use the exact same browser. Even things like whether your laptop is connected to power or not may produce diffs in visual checks. In remote grid, all these risks are gone.
• Wide variety of browsers, versions, you can test on dozens of different environments if you want (for example, testing on real iOS or Android devices)
• You don't need to spend time downloading & installing browsers in CI (although you can solve this with local browsers too just by packing them into your docker image)
• You have zero hardware impact regardless of how many different browsers you want

There's also a third option — using local docker containers with browsers. This option solves such issues as visual checks inconsistencies while still being fast (network-wise) and local.

To sum up, I think it's a good idea to start off with local browser and as your project grows and your tests become more complex, switch to browsers in docker images and eventually remote grid. Plus, you can always use remote grid in you CI tasks while keeping local browsers for development.

To switch to remote grid you just need to pass gridUrl parameter in testplane config.