Jan

Jan is an open-source desktop application that brings AI chat to your own hardware, with a design philosophy centered entirely on privacy and user ownership. With over 5.3 million downloads and 41,000+ GitHub stars, it has become the community's favorite privacy-first alternative to ChatGPT.

**Core philosophy — Personal Intelligence**: Jan is built on the principle that AI should answer only to you. Every conversation stays on your device. No data is sent to cloud servers. No telemetry. No subscription to cancel. The model runs locally, inferences locally, and stores conversation history locally.

**Hybrid local + cloud**: While Jan excels at fully offline inference, it also supports hybrid use: connect it to cloud providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, and others) through the same interface. This lets you switch between local privacy and cloud capability without changing apps.

**Supported models**: Jan works with any GGUF-compatible model from Hugging Face, plus has a built-in model hub for one-click downloads of popular models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Phi, DeepSeek, and more). Both CPU and GPU inference are supported, with Apple Silicon optimization via MLX.

**Key features**: - Offline-capable — works without internet once models are downloaded - Multi-conversation management with persistent history - Extensions ecosystem for additional integrations - OpenAI-compatible local API server for connecting other apps - Active open-source community (MIT licensed) - Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux

Jan is the right choice for anyone who needs a capable AI assistant but cannot or will not send sensitive data to third-party servers.