
Jan
Offline-first, privacy-focused desktop app to run LLMs locally on any hardware
Overview
Jan is an open-source, cross-platform desktop application that lets users download and run LLMs entirely offline. It bundles llama.cpp as its inference engine and provides a clean chat UI along with an OpenAI-compatible local API server. Models are downloaded from the built-in Hub or imported manually from Hugging Face.
Where it falls short of ChatGPT
- Desktop-only; no headless server deployment mode
- Multi-user collaboration not supported
- Limited to llama.cpp-compatible model formats
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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