Self-Hosted AI Search and Deep Research

Karakeep is a bookmark manager for people who collect links, notes, images and PDFs in one place. You can run the open source app on your own server with Docker under the AGPL-3.0 license, or use the managed Karakeep Cloud service. It has a web app, iOS and Android apps, and extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Onyx is an AI search and chat platform for teams whose information is spread across workplace apps. It indexes company knowledge so employees can ask questions across sources and get answers grounded in relevant documents. Teams can deploy it in their own cloud or on bare metal, including an air-gapped environment.

GPT Researcher is a self-hosted AI research agent for people who need detailed, cited reports drawn from the web, their own documents, or both. You choose the language model and search provider, and can run the software on your own server or through Docker. It's open source under Apache 2.0.

SearXNG is a self-hosted metasearch engine for people who want web search without user tracking or profiling. It brings results from separate search services into one browser interface. You can run your own instance or use a public one, depending on who you want to trust with your searches.

QMD is a local search engine for people with Markdown notes, meeting transcripts, or documentation they want to search themselves or make available to an AI agent. It accepts exact keywords and natural-language queries, with indexing and model inference running on your own machine. It's open source under MIT.

Perfect Memory AI keeps a searchable record of what you've seen on your screen and heard in meetings on Mac and Windows. It's for people who need to find a page, presentation or conversation again without remembering which app held it. Recordings stay on your device, and search returns material you've actually seen or heard.

MindSearch is a self-hosted AI search framework for people who want to build their own Perplexity-style answer engine. Multiple LLM agents search and read web pages to produce answers with a visible research process. It's open source under Apache 2.0.

Open Deep Research is a self-hosted AI agent that searches for information and writes research reports. It's for developers and teams who want to choose their own models and research tools. The project is archived and no longer maintained.

Scira is an AI search engine for people who want answers backed by sources and control over the application they use for research. It has a hosted website, and you can self-host the open-source application under AGPL-3.0. Its live search relies on internet access and external services; self-hosting doesn't make that research offline.

STORM is an MIT-licensed, open-source research tool from Stanford OVAL that turns a topic into a Wikipedia-style report with citations. You can run its Python software on your own machine or host it on a server; Stanford also offers a hosted research preview. It's aimed at people gathering background material and writers preparing an article draft.

Morphic is a self-hosted AI search engine for people who want answers backed by web sources and control over the search interface they use. It combines web searches and URL reading with AI-generated responses, so you can examine the sources behind an answer. It's open source under Apache 2.0, and you can run your own instance with Docker or use the hosted website.

Farfalle is a self-hosted AI search engine for people who want a Perplexity-style search app with a choice of local or cloud models. It combines web search with model-generated answers and includes an agent that plans and carries out searches. The code is open source under Apache 2.0.

OpenRecall records your screen at regular intervals and makes that history searchable with local AI. It's a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft's Windows Recall and Rewind.ai for people who want to find something they previously saw on their computer. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, with a browser interface served from your own machine.

R2R is a self-hosted AI retrieval system for developers building applications that answer questions using their own documents. It combines search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a reasoning agent behind a REST API. The project is open source under the MIT license and runs as a Python service or in Docker.

Joplin Jarvis is an AI assistant for people who keep their writing, research, or personal knowledge in Joplin on desktop and mobile. It connects conversations to your existing notes and supports local LLMs through Ollama alongside cloud services such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Hugging Face.

ChatDev is a self-hosted platform for building teams of AI agents through a visual workflow editor. It's for people who want agents to collaborate on research, data analysis or software projects without writing the orchestration code themselves. You define each agent's role and how information passes between them.

Nanobrowser is an open-source AI agent that automates web tasks inside Chrome or Edge. It's for people who want to delegate repetitive browsing or research while choosing which models handle the work. The extension runs in your browser and is an alternative to OpenAI Operator, with an Apache 2.0 license.

Mattermost Agents brings AI assistants into a self-hosted Mattermost workspace, with a choice of local models or cloud providers. It's for teams that want help with long discussions and meeting recordings while controlling where their collaboration data goes. The plugin is open source under Apache 2.0.

DocsGPT is an MIT-licensed, open-source platform for teams that want AI search, assistants and agents over their own documents. It can run on your servers with local models, including fully air-gapped deployments where documents and questions stay inside your network. Answers include the source title and page number so readers can check the evidence.

Obsidian Copilot brings AI agents into your vault to find notes by meaning, edit drafts and organize research. It's for writers, researchers and other Obsidian users who want AI to work directly with their existing notes. Agents create Markdown files, wikilinks and canvases that remain in your vault.

Local Deep Research is a self-hosted AI research assistant for people who need cited answers drawn from academic papers, the web and their own documents. It can produce a quick summary or pursue a complex question through repeated searches, then assemble a structured report. It's open source under MIT.

PaperQA2 is an open source Python research assistant for people who need answers grounded in a collection of scientific papers. It searches documents on your machine and writes answers with in-text citations, including page references. Researchers can use it to summarize findings or check for contradictions across papers, while developers can build it into their own research tools.

AppFlowy is a self-hosted Notion alternative for teams that want project management, shared documents, and AI in an environment they control. Its self-hosted enterprise offering can run on premises, in your own cloud, or in an air-gapped environment. Self-hosted LLMs and embedding models let you keep AI processing and workspace data inside your infrastructure, with no vendor access to your instance.

Khoj is an AI assistant for people who want to ask questions across their own files, research the web, and give recurring work to agents. You can self-host it on your computer or server, or use Khoj's cloud app. It's open source under the GNU AGPL v3.0 license.

Vane (formerly Perplexica) is a self-hosted AI search engine for people who want answers drawn from web results, with citations they can check. It runs on your own hardware through Docker or as a server application, with a browser interface and locally stored search history. The project is free and open source under the MIT license.