Private AI for Documents, Writing and Research

Reor is a local AI note-taking app for people who want to search their own writing, find connections between ideas and ask questions about their notes. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and it's open source under AGPL-3.0.

QAnything is a self-hosted knowledge base for people and teams who want to ask questions about their own documents, including collections that mix Chinese and English. It can answer in either language regardless of the document's language, and runs locally through Docker on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Raycast Ollama brings Ollama models into Raycast on macOS and Windows, for people who want AI chat and text assistance within their desktop launcher. It connects to Ollama on your own machine or a remote server you choose. The extension is open source under the MIT license, and local inference doesn't require an Ollama API key.

Lumos is a Chrome extension for asking questions about web pages using models running on your own machine. It's for readers working through long discussions, product reviews, news articles or technical documentation who want summaries and answers tied to the material they're reading. Ollama handles inference locally, without a remote AI server.

Verba is a self-hosted document chatbot for people who want to ask questions across their files and knowledge bases. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It uses Weaviate to find relevant passages and gives those passages to a language model to generate answers.

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 The project is archived and no longer maintained.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.

insanely-fast-whisper is a command-line tool for people who want to transcribe audio on their own hardware, with a focus on processing long recordings quickly. It runs OpenAI's Whisper locally on NVIDIA GPUs or Apple Silicon Macs, including support for Windows with CUDA. The project is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

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.

Bergamot Translator is a C++ library for running neural machine translation on your own device. Developers can integrate it into native applications or build it for WebAssembly. Separate browser integrations, such as the TranslateLocally extension, make the engine accessible to end users. The software is free and open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Zero is an open-source, self-hosted AI email app for people who want control over their inbox software while keeping accounts with providers such as Gmail and Outlook.

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.

Kerlig is a paid AI writing assistant for Mac that works with text in the apps you already use. It's aimed at people writing client emails, Slack replies and Jira tickets who want help editing and drafting without moving everything into a browser chat. It runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 12 or later.

Writeopia is a writing and note-taking app for people who want AI assistance while keeping their documents on their own computer. It runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, with offline access to locally stored notes and a choice of AI models that run on your device. It's aimed at writers, developers and researchers working on drafts, documentation or personal notes.

Hillnote is a writing and planning workspace for people who want their notes on their own disk, with AI available inside the editor. It runs on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. The editor, workspace and local AI work offline, and getting started doesn't require an account.

BrainSoup is a proprietary native Windows app for people who want custom AI agents to handle work on their desktop. You can give agents distinct roles and access to different data, then have them collaborate in shared chat rooms. Natural-language conversations guide their tasks and automations.

Trilium Notes is a local-first note-taking app for people building a large personal knowledge base. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, or on your own server through Docker, with browser access and a mobile web interface. It's free and open source under AGPL-3.0.

Mikupad is a browser-based LLM frontend packaged as a single HTML file, for writers and people who want control over generated text. It connects to a model backend of your choice and supports both direct text continuation and chat with instruct models. It's open source under AGPL-3.0.

Anarlog, formerly Hyprnote, is a desktop AI meeting notetaker for people who want to keep private conversations on their own hardware. It captures audio from your device without adding a bot to the call and stays hidden during screen sharing. The app runs on macOS, Windows and Linux; its community application is open source under the MIT license.

Voxtral is Mistral AI's open-source audio and text model for developers building self-hosted speech applications. It can answer questions about recordings and produce structured summaries within the same model that transcribes speech. Mistral's separate mistral-inference library is archived and no longer maintained; Voxtral supports vLLM and Hugging Face Transformers.

Paperless-AI is a self-hosted extension for Paperless-ngx users who want automatic document sorting and chat with their archive. It requires an existing Paperless-ngx instance and runs in Docker, with a browser interface for reviewing and processing documents. The project is no longer maintained.

MindMac is a native macOS AI chat client for people who want to use local LLMs and cloud services in the same app. Its inline mode lets you ask questions or generate text inside Notes, Mail and browsers without switching to a chat window. It runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 13 or newer.

Pieces runs in the background on your computer and builds a searchable history of your work across apps. It's for people who need to recover a decision, find earlier research or resume a task after switching between tools. Memories stay on your machine by default.

Cognita is a self-hosted RAG framework for developers building applications that answer questions using their own documents. The project is archived and no longer maintained. It combines a browser interface for document Q&A with reusable components built on LangChain and LlamaIndex, under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

5ire is a free desktop AI assistant that combines chat, a local document knowledge base and MCP tools. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, with Mac downloads for Apple Silicon and Intel. It's for people who want to use their own documents and external tools alongside conversations with local or cloud models.

Qwen2.5-VL is a vision-language model you can run on your own hardware to answer questions about images and video. It's aimed at developers building document processing tools, visual assistants and agents that interact with computer or phone screens. The instruction-tuned 7B model has Apache 2.0 licensing and works with Hugging Face Transformers, with weights available in Safetensors format.

DB-GPT is a self-hosted AI data assistant for teams analyzing business data and developers building data applications. It turns plain-language requests into SQL queries and Python analysis, then produces charts, dashboards, or HTML reports. You can run it on macOS or Linux, with Docker deployment also supported.

Unstructured is a local document processing library for developers building LLM applications and document ingestion pipelines. It turns PDFs, Word documents, HTML, emails and images into document elements that applications can use. The Python library is open source under Apache 2.0 and runs on your own hardware, including through Docker images for x86_64 and Apple Silicon.

Morphik Core is a self-hosted multimodal retrieval engine for developers building AI applications around visually rich documents. It searches diagrams, schematics, charts, and datasheets alongside text, so applications can retrieve information that text extraction alone can miss. You can run it on your own server, including through Docker, or use Morphik's hosted service.

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.

NativeMind brings a local AI assistant into Chrome for people who want help with webpages, documents, and writing without sending that content to a cloud model. The browser extension connects to Ollama on your machine, keeping prompts and AI processing on-device. It requires no account and uses the AGPL-3.0 open-source license.

NotebookLlama is a self-hosted NotebookLM alternative for people who want to work with documents through an app they can host and modify. Its browser interface runs locally, while LlamaCloud provides document extraction and indexing. It requires cloud services.

Private LLM runs AI chat entirely on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. It's an app for people who want to use language models without sending their conversations to a cloud service. After the first model download, it works offline and requires no account. Conversations stay on-device, with no tracking or logs.