Jan is an open-source desktop app that lets you run AI models on your own computer. It offers a chat interface for local models, including Jan's own Jan-V1-4B, and can also connect to providers such as Hugging Face through its settings. Web search and MCP options are built in, and community users demonstrate local deep research workflows. The app is free to download, has more than 6.8 million downloads, and the current release is v0.8.4.
Privacy-conscious users are the clearest fit, since conversations and data stay on the machine and there are no API bills for local models. Developers and hobbyists who want to experiment with open models without learning command-line tools can use the simple interface. Researchers and writers who need an offline assistant, and teams that cannot send sensitive text to cloud services, also benefit. Users should have hardware capable of running the chosen model, since performance varies with the machine.
Common uses include chatting with open models offline, running web-search-assisted answers on a laptop, and testing different quantized models to compare speed, with MLX and llama.cpp backends mentioned by community users. Developers connect remote providers or Hugging Face models when a local model is too slow, and use MCP to extend what the assistant can do. Writers draft and summarize text privately, and analysts run deep research sessions without sharing data with third parties. Because Jan is open source and has an active community, new models and features appear regularly, and users can switch between local and hosted models in one interface depending on the task.
