> Markdown twin of https://conduitllm.com/best-mcp-clients.html > Which MCP client should you install? A checkable comparison of the desktop apps that speak MCP — Conduit, Claude Desktop, Cherry Studio, Jan and LM Studio. --- Comparison # Best MCP clients, compared We make one of the clients on this page, so read it the way you would read any vendor comparison. The rule we set ourselves is the same one we use everywhere else on this site: every row has to be checkable against the other project's own documentation, and the competitors have to win the rows they actually win. They win several. Everything below was checked against each project's own sources on 10 September 2026 — where something has changed since, their documentation is right and this page is wrong. ## The short answer Most "best MCP client" lists answer a different question than the one you asked, because they mix three kinds of software that happen to share a protocol. Sort by what you are trying to do and the list gets short: | If you want to… | Install | | --- | --- | | Use Claude, and have it feel finished | **Claude Desktop** — the reference client, signed installers, an extension directory | | Run the model itself on your own hardware | **LM Studio** or **Jan** — both run local weights and both speak MCP | | Put many providers behind one window with your own keys | **Conduit** or **Cherry Studio** | | Give a team a shared, self-hosted chat surface | **LibreChat** or **Open WebUI** — server software, not desktop apps | | Have an agent edit your codebase | An IDE client — Cursor, Cline, Continue, VS Code, Zed. A different shape entirely; see below | ## The three shapes, and why the distinction matters **Desktop chat clients** install as a native application and keep their data on your disk. This is the category Conduit is in, along with Claude Desktop, Cherry Studio, Jan and LM Studio. **Self-hosted web clients** are servers you run — usually in Docker — and reach through a browser. LibreChat and Open WebUI are the two most established. They are the right answer for a team and the wrong answer for one person on one laptop, because you are taking on an operations job in exchange for multi-user access. **IDE and agent clients** put the model inside your editor so it can read and write your code. Cursor, Cline, Continue, VS Code and Zed all support MCP, and every roundup is dominated by them because that is where the money is. If your job is "an agent that edits my repository", stop reading this page and install one of those — none of the desktop chat clients here is trying to compete with them. The rest of this page is about the first two shapes, because that is where the question "which one should I install?" is genuinely unsettled. ## Desktop chat clients, side by side | | Conduit | Claude Desktop | Cherry Studio | Jan | LM Studio | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Licence | AGPL-3.0-only | Proprietary | AGPL-3.0, with a commercial licence sold separately | Apache-2.0 | Source not published — see their terms | | Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux (.deb + AppImage) | Windows, macOS, Linux beta (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Debian 12+) | Windows, macOS, Linux | Windows 10+, macOS 13.6+, Linux (deb, AppImage, arm64) | Apple Silicon macOS, x64/arm64 Windows, x64 Linux | | Runs models locally | No — connects to Ollama and LM Studio | No | No — connects to Ollama and LM Studio | **Yes**, downloads and runs weights | **Yes**, downloads and runs weights | | Cloud providers, your own key | 17 built in, plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint | No — an Anthropic account, not a key | Yes, major providers | Yes, major providers | Local models are the product | | Local MCP servers (stdio) | Yes, supervised child processes with per-tool consent | Yes, one click for a packaged `.mcpb` extension | Yes | Yes | Yes, via `mcp.json` | | Remote MCP servers | Streamable HTTP with OAuth, **reached from your machine** | Custom connectors, **reached from Anthropic's cloud** | Yes | Yes | Yes, local and remote | | Where conversations live | SQLite on your disk, no account | Your Claude account, synced across devices | On your machine | On your machine | On your machine | | Retrieval over your own documents | Yes — Documents collections (text, Markdown, CSV, Word, PDF), hybrid vector and keyword search, local database | Yes, via Projects knowledge — automatic RAG mode is Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise only, stored in your account | Yes — a local Knowledge Base, cited in the reply | Yes — built-in retrieval with source citations | Yes — automatic RAG for documents too long for context (.docx, .pdf, .txt) | | Code-signed installers | **No** — SmartScreen and Gatekeeper warn on first launch | **Yes** | Yes | Yes | Yes | Two rows in that table are the ones worth slowing down for, because they are the ones that are hard to change your mind about later. ### Where a remote server is reached from Every client in the table can talk to a remote MCP server. They do not all do it from the same place. Conduit opens the connection from your machine; Anthropic's custom connectors are reached from Anthropic's infrastructure on your behalf. For a public API that difference is invisible. For a server on `localhost`, inside a VPN, or behind a corporate firewall, it is the whole question — a cloud-reached connector cannot see a host that only exists on your network. ### What the licence lets you do afterwards "Open source" hides a lot of variation. Apache-2.0 (Jan) and MIT (LibreChat) are permissive: build on them, ship the result, keep your changes to yourself. AGPL-3.0 (Conduit, Cherry Studio) is strong copyleft: you can fork and ship, but network users get the right to your source too. Cherry Studio sells a commercial licence that lifts those obligations; Conduit does not sell one today. And Open WebUI's licence carries a requirement to preserve its branding, which matters a great deal if your plan was to rebrand it. None of this is a defect in any of them — it is four different answers to "what do you owe the project?" and the right time to read it is before you build, not after. ## Self-hosted, for teams **LibreChat** is MIT-licensed, deploys with Docker, and connects to essentially every provider plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and it supports MCP. If you want the permissive licence and the widest provider list, this is the one. **Open WebUI** runs via pip, Docker, or Kubernetes, has a native desktop wrapper and a PWA, and reaches MCP servers through MCP, MCPO and OpenAPI tool servers. Its licence includes an additional requirement to preserve the Open WebUI branding — check `LICENSE` and `LICENSE_HISTORY` in the repository before you plan anything that involves changing the name or logo. Both are the wrong tool for a single user on a single machine. You are running and updating a server so that several people can share it; if nobody is sharing it, that cost buys you nothing. ## Where Conduit fits, and where it does not Conduit is a desktop chat client for people who want more than one provider behind one window, with keys they own, and conversations that never leave their disk. 17 providers ship built in, plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so a frontier model, a cheap fast one, and a local one can sit in the same conversation list. MCP servers run as supervised local processes with consent prompts per tool — including, now, the prompts and resources those servers offer, not just their tools — and remote ones are reached over streamable HTTP with OAuth from your machine. Documents collections add retrieval over your own files, pages it builds can be kept as apps, workflows run routines on a schedule, and the UI itself ships in eight languages. It is AGPL-3.0-only and can be rebranded at runtime today. Stated plainly, because a comparison that only lists wins is an advertisement — here is where the other clients on this page are the better install: - **No code-signed installers yet** — every other client in the table installs without a SmartScreen or Gatekeeper warning, and Conduit does not. If you are recommending something to a non-developer, that warning costs you the recommendation - **It does not run models** — Jan and LM Studio download and run weights themselves. Conduit needs Ollama or LM Studio underneath for local inference - **It is a release candidate**, first packaged build in August 2026. Claude Desktop, Cherry Studio and LM Studio are finished products with far more road behind them - **No extension directory for local servers** — Claude Desktop installs a packaged `.mcpb` in one click and lets you browse a catalogue; Conduit has one-click install for remote servers from the official MCP registry, but local ones you add by hand - **No cloud sync, no mobile app, no support queue** — the local database is the only copy, and questions go to GitHub rather than to anyone whose job it is to answer them - **Document retrieval needs a non-local provider unless you use Ollama** — indexing sends the full text to whichever provider embeds the collection ## How to judge any MCP client This list will be out of date before the category settles. These five questions will not be — ask them of anything you are considering, including the clients above: - **Which transports does it actually support?** — stdio for local servers is table stakes; remote support is where clients differ, and a project claiming "MCP support" may mean only one of them - **Where is a remote server reached from** — your machine, or the vendor's cloud? This decides whether internal tools are reachable at all - **What does it ask before running a tool?** — an MCP server can run arbitrary code and read your files. LM Studio's own documentation says so plainly. A client that never prompts is making that decision for you - **Where do the conversations live** — your disk, or an account? Both are defensible; only one survives the vendor going away - **What does the licence require of you?** — especially if you intend to distribute anything built on it ## Which one should you install? If you mostly want Claude and want it to feel finished, install Claude Desktop. If the model running on your own hardware is the point, install LM Studio or Jan. If a team needs to share one surface, run LibreChat. If you want several providers behind one window with keys you own and history on your own disk — and you can live with an unsigned first launch — install Conduit. They also coexist: the same MCP server can be configured in several of them, and nothing here is exclusive. [Download Conduit](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit/releases) Want the single-competitor version of this in more depth? [Conduit vs Claude Desktop](https://conduitllm.com/compare/claude-desktop.html) goes row by row. If you are on the other side of the protocol — you built a server and need to put it in front of a customer — that is [a different problem with its own page](https://conduitllm.com/mcp-distribution.html). ## Questions **What is an MCP client?** An MCP client is the application that connects a model to your tools. The Model Context Protocol standardises how an AI app talks to external systems — files, databases, APIs — so a tool built once works in any client that speaks the protocol. The client is the half you install: it decides which transports it can use, whether servers run on your machine or someone else's, and what it asks you before a tool runs. The server is the tool itself. **Which MCP client is best for local models?** LM Studio and Jan both run models on your own machine and speak MCP, and either is a reasonable answer if the model itself is the point. Conduit does not run models — it connects to Ollama and LM Studio as providers, so the model runs in one of those and the chat, tools, and history live in Conduit. Pick by what you want to be local: the weights, the conversation, or both. **Is there an open-source MCP client?** Several. Conduit is AGPL-3.0-only, Jan is Apache-2.0, LibreChat is MIT, and Cherry Studio is AGPL-3.0 with a separate commercial licence available from its authors. Open source is not one thing, though — the licence decides what you may do with a build you distribute, and the copyleft ones ask for your source in return. Read the licence before you ship anything based on one of them. **What is the difference between an MCP client and an MCP host?** In the protocol's own vocabulary the host is the application, and it creates one client per server connection. In everyday use people say "MCP client" for the app you install, which is what this page does. The distinction matters when you read a project's docs and find it describing itself as a host — LM Studio does — because that is the same claim, stated in the protocol's terms. **Do MCP servers run on my machine or in the cloud?** That depends on the client, and it is the difference most roundups skip. A local server is a program the client starts on your computer over stdio. A remote server is reached over HTTP — but by whom differs: some clients reach it from your machine, and some reach it from the vendor's cloud on your behalf. If the tool sits behind your firewall or on localhost, only the first shape can see it. Check this before you choose. Sources, all checked 10 September 2026: Claude Desktop — [installation](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/10065433-installing-claude-desktop), [local MCP servers](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/10949351-getting-started-with-local-mcp-servers-on-claude-desktop), [custom connectors](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11175166-get-started-with-custom-connectors-using-remote-mcp). [Cherry Studio](https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio), [Jan](https://github.com/janhq/jan), [LibreChat](https://github.com/danny-avila/LibreChat) and [Open WebUI](https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui) — each project's own repository and licence. LM Studio — its [MCP](https://lmstudio.ai/docs/app/mcp) and [application](https://lmstudio.ai/docs/app) documentation; we make no claim about its licence because we could not find one stated there. The "Retrieval over your own documents" row was checked 23 September 2026 against Anthropic's [Projects](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9517075-what-are-projects) documentation, Cherry Studio's [Knowledge Base](https://docs.cherryai.com.cn/docs/en-us/knowledge-base/knowledge-base) docs, Jan's [changelog](https://www.jan.ai/changelog/2026-07-21-jan-v0.8.4), and LM Studio's [RAG](https://lmstudio.ai/docs/app/basics/rag) documentation. Conduit rows are checkable against [the documentation](https://conduitllm.com/docs.html) and [the source](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit). Found an error? [Tell us](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit/discussions) and we will fix it. ## Related - [Conduit vs Msty](https://conduitllm.com/compare/msty.html) — A Msty alternative? Conduit vs Msty Studio, checked 3 Oct 2026 — licence, pricing, local models, MCP, and the rows Msty wins. Free and open source. - [Conduit vs Chatbox](https://conduitllm.com/compare/chatbox.html) — A Chatbox alternative? Conduit vs Chatbox, checked 3 Oct 2026 — licence, pricing, MCP, local models, mobile, and the rows Chatbox wins. Free and open source. - [Conduit vs TypingMind](https://conduitllm.com/compare/typingmind.html) — A TypingMind alternative? Conduit vs TypingMind, checked 24 Sept 2026: a free, open-source desktop app vs a paid-licence web app, and the rows TypingMind wins. - [Conduit vs Open WebUI](https://conduitllm.com/compare/open-webui.html) — An Open WebUI alternative built as a native desktop app, not a bundled server. Checked 24 Sept 2026, including the rows Open WebUI wins. Free and open source. - [Conduit vs LM Studio](https://conduitllm.com/compare/lm-studio.html) — Conduit vs LM Studio, checked 24 Sept 2026: LM Studio runs local models; Conduit is a free, open-source app for them and cloud models. Why many run both. - [Conduit vs Ollama's own app](https://conduitllm.com/compare/ollama.html) — Ollama ships its own chat app now. What it does, what a separate client adds, and why most people end up running both rather than choosing. - [Conduit vs Claude Desktop](https://conduitllm.com/compare/claude-desktop.html) — A checkable comparison of Conduit and Claude Desktop — models, storage, MCP setup, platforms, licence and code signing, by the people who make one of them.