Install

Moved to a new laptop and Ollama wasn't performing great so decided to look for an alternative. After a quick search I found Jan.ai. Installation with flatpak, and was up and running in a few moments.

flatpak install flathub ai.jan.Jan flatpak run ai.jan.Jan

On startup you're asked to install the default model Jan-v3.5-4B and you get a UI chatbot.
chatbot Image

Getting started was similar to Ollama.

Adding other models

Like Ollama you can install other models from the Hub

hub screenshot

Running Jan.ai as a local API endpoint

Like Ollama you can expose Jan.ai via API for developing your own AI POC.
Jan.ai includes a local API server. In Jan, go to Settings → Local API Server, choose the model, and click Start Server.

enable API Server image

The default address is http://127.0.0.1:1337/v1. You can set an API key in the server settings; if you leave it blank, omit the authorization header. From a terminal you can curl, or access it in code.

curl http://127.0.0.1:1337/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "model": "YOUR_MODEL_ID", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Explain this code."}] }'

GPU access

One extra thing I installed was Vulkan. Vulkan basically gives you access to the laptop Intel GPU to improve the model's performance locally.

jan ai settings

It's installed as follows on Fedora.

sudo dnf install mesa-vulkan-drivers vulkan-tools # Test vulkaninfo --summary

This worked out of the box for Jan.ai. I wasn't able to get Vulkan working for Ollama, I believe it relies on an env var OLLAMA_VULKAN=1 but didn't see any improvement with the env var set.

Summary

  • All of the Ollama functionality I use is present.
  • The user interface was an improvement with Jan.ai.
  • There is extra functionality avaliable with Jan.ai like setting up a proxy for external access or allowing web access to the chatbot, neither of these are avaliable in Ollama.
  • I tried a few of the same models for example qwen3.8b. Jan.ai was a lot quicker overall for simple chats. It was not even close.
  • Jan.ai Hub has a lot of models, I notice models like mistral were missing.

But in answer my question yes it is a good replacement.