# Jan vs KoboldCpp (slim)

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

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jan-vs-koboldcpp.md (~2,350 tokens) · this version ~580 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jan-vs-koboldcpp.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jan-vs-koboldcpp
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

KoboldCpp scores 60.5 (C) on agent readiness against Jan's 51.3 (D), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Jan leads on security & auth and transparency & trust. Both do local inference.

- Jan: D 51.3, rank #672 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/jan.min.md
- KoboldCpp: C 60.5, rank #462 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/koboldcpp.min.md
- 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. Ahead on Security & auth, 43 against 38; Transparency & trust, 68 against 49.
- KoboldCpp, good for An owner who wants text, image, speech and music models behind one executable with a writing and roleplay interface, and clients that speak the KoboldAI, OpenAI, Ollama or Anthropic formats. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 68 against 56; Agent ergonomics, 63 against 46; Maintenance & community, 82 against 47. Also No key needed to call it; No incidents deducted, where Jan loses 4 points for them.

| Category | Jan | KoboldCpp |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 68 | 68 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 56 | 68 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 46 | 63 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 43 | 38 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 60 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 47 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 68 | 49 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Jan | KoboldCpp |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Menlo Research | LostRuins (Concedo) |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 for KoboldCpp and KoboldAI Lite. The bundled GGML, llama.cpp and stable-diffusion.cpp code stays under MIT |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-07-23 | 2026-09-27 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-01-16 | no document linked |
| Popularity | 45k stars | 12k stars |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | none |