Jan – Ollama alternative with local UI

81•maxloh•5h ago

Comments

roscas•4h ago

Tried to run Jan but it does not start llama server. It also tries to allocate 30gb that is the size of the model but my vram is only 10gb and machine is 32gb, so it does not make sense. Ollama works perfect with 30b models. Another thing that is not good is that it make constant connections to github and other sites.

SilverRubicon•2h ago

Did you see the feature list? It does not deny that makes connections to other sites.

- Cloud Integration: Connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, and others

- Privacy First: Everything runs locally when you want it to

trilogic•2h ago

If you looking for privacy there is only 1 app in the whole wide internet right now, HugstonOne (I challenge everyone to find another local GUI with that privacy). That said, Jan is also a good app and deserves credit for being local, there is no app without bugs.

imiric•1h ago

You mean this[1]?

It's not open source, has no license, runs on Windows only, and requires an activation code to use.

Also, the privacy policy on their website is missing[2].

Anyone remotely concerned about privacy wouldn't come near this thing.

Ah, you're the author, no wonder you're shilling for it.

[1]: https://github.com/Mainframework/HugstonOne

[2]: https://hugston.com/privacy

trilogic•1h ago

The app has a licence well visible when you install the app. The rest is written in the website and in github. Then about: requires an activation code to use, ofc it is made for ethical research purposes, so yes I am distributing it responsibly. And you can see the videos in the youtube channel for how it works. But the most important point is that you can try it easily with a firewall to see that it do not leak bytes like all the rest there. That´s what i call privacy, It has a button that cut all connection. You can say what you want but that´s it that´s all.

do_not_redeem•1h ago

> But the most important point is that you can try it easily with a firewall to see that it do not leak bytes like all the rest there.

Great to hear! Since you care so much about privacy, how can I get an activation code without sending any bytes over a network or revealing my email address?

riquito•24m ago

Closed source, without 3rd party independent review and people should just trust you? As if your app cannot start sending data away in a month or attempt to detect monitoring software, to name a couple

kgeist•1h ago

>I challenge everyone to find another local GUI with that privacy

Llama.cpp's built-in web UI.

trilogic•1h ago

This is from webui website docs: Once saved, Open WebUI will begin using your local Llama.cpp server as a backend! So you see Llama server not CLI. That´s a big flag there. I repeat no app in the whole world takes seriously privacy like HugstonOne. This is not advertisement, I am just making a point.

kgeist•1h ago

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Llama.cpp is an inference server which runs LLMs locally. It has a built-in web UI. You can't get more private than the inference server itself.

I tried downloading your app, and it's a whopping 500 MB. What takes up the most disk space? The llama-server binary with the built-in web UI is like a couple MBs.

trilogic•53m ago

With all respect you do seem to not understand much of how privacy works. Llama-server is working in Http. And yes the app is a bit heavy as is loading llm models using llama.cpp cli and multimodal which in itself are quite heavy, also just the dlls for cpu/gpu are huge, (just the one for the nvidial gpu is 500mb if I don't go wrong).

rcakebread•33m ago

Says the guy with a link to a broken privacy policy on their website.

kgeist•13m ago

Unless you expose random ports on the local machine to the Internet, running apps on localhost is pretty safe. To me, downloading 500 MB from some random site feels far less safe :)

>the app is a bit heavy as is loading llm models using llama.cpp cli

So it adds an unnecessary overhead of reloading all the weights to VRAM on each message? On some larger models it can take up to a minute. Or you somehow stream input/output from an attached CLI process without restarting it?

woadwarrior01•1h ago

> If you looking for privacy there is only 1 app in the whole wide internet right now, HugstonOne

That's a tall claim.

I've been selling a macOS and iOS private LLM app on the App Store for over two years now, that is:

a) is fully native (not electron.js) b) not a llama.cpp / MLX wrapper c) fully sandboxed (none of Jan, Ollama, LM Studio are)

I will not promote. Quite shameless of you to shill your electron.js based llama.cpp wrapper here.

trilogic•57m ago

Yes it is a bold claim that I defend well though. I have been looking for smth full privacy lik HugstonOne but I couldn't. Like it or not I am proud of it. You still couldn´t mention one good GUI and call me shameless. I don´t really care if is fully native or not as long as it works for my research. I use it mostly for personal medical/health enhancement and my data/history and pics stay mine, there is nothing wrong in that. I accept every challenge to prove that HugstonOne is worth the claim.

rovr138•35m ago

Since they won't promote, here's the link, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/private-llm-local-ai-chat/id64...

> I accept every challenge to prove that HugstonOne is worth the claim.

I expect your review.

hoppp•1h ago

It probably loads the entire model into ram at once while ollama solves this and does not, it has a better loading strategy

biinjo•2h ago

Im confused. Isn’t the whole premise of Ollama that its locallt ran? What’s the difference or USP when comparing the two.

moron4hire•2h ago

That's not the actual tagline being used in the repo. The repo calls itself an alternative to ChatGPT. Whoever submitted the link changed it.

hoppp•1h ago

I think its an alternative because ollama has no UI and its hard to use for non-developers who will never touch the CLI

simonw•1h ago

Ollama added a chat UI to their desktop apps a week ago: https://ollama.com/blog/new-app

apitman•1h ago

Their new app is closed source right?

simonw•1h ago

Huh, yeah it looks like the GUI component is closed source. Their GitHub version only has the CLI.

diggan•59m ago

I think at this point it's fair to say that most of the stuff Ollama does, is closed source. AFAIK, only the CLI is open source, everything else isn't.

bogdart•2h ago

I tried Jan last year, but the UI was quite buggy. But maybe they fixed it.

diggan•57m ago

Please do try it out again, if things used to be broken but they no longer are, it's a good signal that they're gaining stability :) And if it's still broken, even better signal that they're not addressing bugs which would be worse.

esafak•46m ago

So you're saying bugs are good?!

diggan•27m ago

No, but maybe that their shared opinion will be a lot more insightful if they provide a comparison between then and now, instead of leaving it at "it was like that before, now I don't know".

mathfailure•2h ago

Is this an alternative to OpenWebUI?

apitman•1h ago

Not exactly. OWUI is a server with a web app frontend. Jan is a desktop app you install. But it does have the ability to run a server for other apps like OWUI to talk to.

ekianjo•38m ago

Openweb-ui does not include a server.

apitman•35m ago

I was referring to Jan.

semessier•1h ago

still looking for vLLM to support Mac ARM Metal GPUs

baggiponte•40m ago

Yeah. The docs tell you that you should build it yourself, but…

apitman•1h ago

I really like Jan, especially the organization's principles: https://jan.ai/

Main deal breaker for me when I tried it was I couldn't talk to multiple models at once, even if they were remote models on OpenRouter. If I ask a question in one chat, then switch to another chat and ask a question, it will block until the first one is done.

Also Tauri apps feel pretty clunky on Linux for me.

c-hendricks•1h ago

Yeah, webkit2gtk is a bit of a drag

diggan•55m ago

> Also Tauri apps feel pretty clunky on Linux for me.

All of them, or this one specifically? I've developed a bunch of tiny apps for my own usage (on Linux) with Tauri (maybe largest is just 5-6K LoC) and always felt snappy to me, mostly doing all the data processing with Rust then the UI part with ClojureScript+Reagent.

venkyvb•15m ago

How does this compare to LM studio ?

reader9274•13m ago

Tried to run the gpt-oss:20b in ollama (runs perfectly) and tried to connect ollama to jan but it didn't work.

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Jan – Ollama alternative with local UI

Comments

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