Kiln AI
Build, evaluate, and optimize AI systems with an intuitive desktop app
About Kiln AI
Kiln AI is a free, privacy-first desktop application for building and optimizing AI systems. It offers tools for evaluations, RAG, agents, fine-tuning, synthetic data generation, and dataset management — all running locally on your machine with no data leaving your computer.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Completely free and open-source with no usage limits
- Privacy-first — runs locally with no data ever sent to external servers
- Intuitive desktop UI that enables non-technical subject matter experts to contribute to AI development
- Comprehensive toolset covering the full AI development lifecycle from data generation to fine-tuning to evaluation
- Git-based dataset collaboration with UUIDs to avoid collisions and capture attribution
Cons
- Requires some understanding of AI/ML concepts to fully leverage all features
- Desktop-only application — no web-based or cloud-hosted option for remote collaboration
- Relatively new project that may lack the maturity and ecosystem of established MLOps platforms
- Future pricing for commercial users has not been finalized, creating some uncertainty
Key Features
AI Evaluations
Test and evaluate AI model quality with structured evals, including over 2000 pre-built test cases across 100+ models
Fine-Tuning
Zero-code fine-tuning for models like Llama and GPT-4o to build custom AI models tailored to your needs
Synthetic Data Generation
Generate high-quality training datasets for evals and fine-tuning in minutes with interactive visual tooling
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
Build knowledge-powered AI systems using retrieval-augmented generation pipelines
Agentic Systems
Create and manage AI agents with tool use and MCP integration for connecting powerful external tools
Dataset Management
Capture inputs, outputs, human ratings, and feedback to build high-quality structured datasets with Git-based collaboration
Kiln Issues
AI-specific bug tracking system for identifying and resolving issues in your AI systems, similar to software bug trackers
Model Library
Access a curated library of over 100 tested models to skip the guesswork in model selection
Privacy-First Local Execution
Runs entirely on your local machine — your data never leaves your computer, with support for your own API keys or Ollama
Pricing
- Full desktop app (Mac, Windows, Linux)
- AI evaluations and testing
- Fine-tuning (Llama, GPT-4o)
- Synthetic data generation
- RAG and agent building
- Dataset management with Git collaboration
- Model library access
- Local execution — no data leaves your machine
- Bring your own API keys or use Ollama
Best For
Custom AI Model Development
Build and fine-tune custom AI models for your product using zero-code tools, synthetic data generation, and comprehensive evaluations
AI Quality Assurance
Evaluate and test AI systems systematically using structured evals and the Kiln Issues tracker to identify and resolve AI-specific bugs
Team Dataset Collaboration
Enable subject matter experts to generate structured datasets and ratings through an intuitive interface without requiring coding skills
Privacy-Sensitive AI Development
Develop AI systems in regulated industries or with sensitive data, keeping everything local and never sending data to external servers
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