Cognita

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 The project is archived and no longer maintained.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.

The full application can run locally through Docker Compose, including its databases and web interface. Ollama handles local LLMs, while Infinity provides local embeddings and reranking. You can also use OpenAI or TrueFoundry's model gateway, which sends model requests to those services. TrueFoundry is optional, and Cognita supports Qdrant and SingleStore for vector storage.

Its main appeal is control over how documents become answers. Developers can replace parsers, models and retrieval components, then expose the application through an API. The interface lets non-technical users upload documents and ask questions using the components their team provides. It also supports comparing retrieval settings and models, and one application can host multiple RAG systems.

Data sources include local files, web pages, GitHub URLs and S3. Incremental indexing skips unchanged documents, so updates don't require processing the entire collection again. Retrieval options include similarity search, query decomposition and document reranking. Answers include references and relevant document excerpts. Audio and video parsers extend ingestion beyond text documents.