The lab's engine, running on your own machine. Long research walks use your CPU, not ours. Sign-in, market data and publishing stay with the platform.
macOS: an Apple Silicon build is in preparation. It ships once it is notarized with Apple, and will appear here and in the app's updater.
QuanterLab Desktop comes with the Practitioner and Research plans, and each plan gives it exactly what it gives on quanterlab.com: Practitioner every card in the lab except the factor models and the routers, Research every card and research studies sent for review. A Free account can install it and sign in; the app then shows the plans, and you choose one there. Your plan, its renewal date, a change of plan or a cancellation are all in the app: your email at the top right, then License. Sign in with your browser, so accounts made with Google work too. Sign up for free, or see the plans.
Three surfaces
The desktop is the third of three ways an AI can work with QuanterLab, and each does a different job. Expecting one to do another's job is the mistake this table exists to prevent.
| Quantin, in the platform | The QuanterLab connector, in claude.ai | QuanterLab Desktop, on your machine | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A chat assistant inside the web app. | A hosted MCP server your claude.ai account connects to. | The engine, a canvas, and a local MCP server your own AI connects to. |
| It can | Explain cards, methods and results; guide you around the platform. | Read the catalog and the published papers and list your own saved work; run backtests, walk-forwards, scans and your saved canvas strategies (free runs every day on the Free plan; what each plan runs), and summarise them. | Build and run circuits, walk a registered study window by window, compile it, and submit it to the platform. |
| It cannot | Run anything. It is a guide. | See the bars or trade: results arrive as tiers and summaries, never a price series, and nothing it does places an order. | Publish. The platform's review decides that. It also returns no price series, only results. |
| Where the compute is | None. | QuanterLab's servers (what each plan runs). | Your machine. |
| How to start | Open it inside the platform. | Add QuanterLab from Anthropic's Claude directory. Setup. | Install, sign in, then connect your assistant from the desk's Assistant panel (below). |
The assistant's seat
After installing and signing in once, open Assistant in the desk's top bar. It detects Claude Desktop and Claude Code on the machine and one click writes their configuration; no snippet to paste. The same panel shows every tool call the assistant makes, which client made it, and what each changed on the canvas. A change it made can be put back with one click, so a sealed workflow is never touched without a record.
The assistant reads the canvas as it stands, loads a circuit onto it where you can see it, runs the canvas's own consistency check, fetches the engine's prospectus, reads and moves the anchor, and reads the primitive glossary, so it designs in the platform's vocabulary rather than guessing. It cannot publish, and it never sees price series.
The server is the bundled sidecar; the path below is the default install location. Claude Desktop (settings, Developer, edit config):
{
"mcpServers": {
"quanterlab": {
"command": "C:\\Users\\<you>\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\QuanterLab Desktop\\resources\\sidecar\\quanterlab-sidecar.exe",
"args": ["mcp"]
}
}
}
Claude Code:
claude mcp add quanterlab -- "C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Programs\QuanterLab Desktop\resources\sidecar\quanterlab-sidecar.exe" mcp
The desktop app must be running: the server talks to the engine on your machine and refuses to serve until you have signed in. On macOS the sidecar is /Applications/QuanterLab Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/sidecar/quanterlab-sidecar.
Division of labour
Three things never leave quanterlab.com. Your sign-in, which issues the desktop a device token you can revoke. Market data, which the engine fetches through a metered proxy under that token, so no vendor key ships with the app. Publishing, which goes through the same review gate every study on this site passed: the desktop uploads a compiled study with its sealed evidence as a draft, and the platform recompiles it from that evidence before anyone can read it.
The catalog
The desktop runs the shipped catalog and nothing else. A primitive runs inside the engine with the price frame in its hands, so a plugin, whether you wrote it or your assistant did, would be a way for raw market data to leave the engine, and the data licence does not allow that. The catalog grows on the platform side; a primitive you need is a request to contact@quanterlab.com.