# Foundry Local vs Jan (slim)

> Foundry Local scores 60.5 (C) on agent readiness against Jan's 51.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Both do local inference. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-jan.md (~2,400 tokens) · this version ~580 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-jan.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/foundry-local-vs-jan
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Foundry Local scores 60.5 (C) on agent readiness against Jan's 51.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Both do local inference.

- Foundry Local: C 60.5, rank #461 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/foundry-local.min.md
- Jan: D 51.3, rank #672 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/jan.min.md
- Foundry Local, good for An application that ships a model to end users' Windows, macOS or Linux devices and wants NPU and GPU variants chosen automatically, especially on Windows. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 61 against 46; Maintenance & community, 88 against 47. Also No key needed to call it; No incidents deducted, where Jan loses 4 points for them.
- Jan, good for A person who wants an open-source desktop app for local and cloud models with MCP, and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for their own tools.

| Category | Foundry Local | Jan |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 68 | 68 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 53 | 56 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 61 | 46 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 39 | 43 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 88 | 47 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 72 | 68 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Foundry Local | Jan |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | SDK + MCP | Model platform |
| Vendor | Microsoft | Menlo Research |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Licence | MIT for the SDKs and the v2 native runtime. The CLI is closed source under Microsoft Software Licence Terms. Execution providers carry NVIDIA, Intel and Qualcomm licences, and each model carries its own | Apache-2.0 |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-07-23 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2025-01-16 |
| Popularity | 2.6k stars, 105k npm/wk, 47k PyPI/wk | 45k stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 2/5 (2) |