Jan

Jan is an open-source desktop chat app for running local models or connecting to cloud providers like GPT and Claude from one clean interface, aimed at users who want private, self-managed AI conversations.

Jan is a desktop chat client that puts a language model on your own hardware. It is an open-source alternative to hosted assistants, built around a simple idea: pick a model, run it on your computer or point the app at a cloud provider, and keep the conversation in one native interface. The homepage positions it as personal intelligence where you run any model your way, and the download count sits above six million. The workflow is closer to managing a library than opening a website. Local open-source models can be downloaded and executed on the machine itself, so prompts and replies never need to leave the device. For heavier tasks, the same window accepts cloud models such as GPT and Claude, or a Hugging Face PRO account where a model id is pasted into Settings, Providers, Hugging Face and used immediately. The project ships its own model line (Jan-V1-4B) alongside the wider ecosystem, and users report running DeepSeek R1 locally with web search switched on before the model answers. Jan is aimed at people who want the chat habit without a subscription meter or a data pipeline they cannot see. Privacy-minded professionals, researchers and tinkerers are the obvious audience, and the homepage leans on testimonials calling it friendlier than LM Studio and Ollama, which are described as engineer-built. Beginners benefit from the clean interface; advanced users get provider settings, MCP support and model choice. The trade-off compared with a hosted assistant is that quality, speed and memory use depend on your own machine. Among alternatives, Jan sits between raw inference tools such as Ollama and closed chat products. It offers less model breadth out of the box than a hosted service and asks more of your hardware, but it costs nothing at the app layer and keeps local conversation private.