Research Agent

Research Agent is a free, MIT-licensed, open source AI agent that combines online research with documents on your machine. It's for people investigating technical topics or comparing papers who want cited reports and a choice of local or cloud models. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a browser dashboard and a command-line interface for automation.

The agent plans searches across arXiv, DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia, extracts article text, and brings the evidence together in a report. You can include PDF, text and Markdown documents and cross-reference their contents with online sources. Reports contain numbered citations, comparison tables and linked bibliographies so you can inspect the material behind the findings.

Local model support includes Ollama with Llama 3.2, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 2.5, plus OpenAI-compatible servers such as LM Studio, vLLM and LocalAI. Local inference doesn't require cloud API keys. Online source discovery needs internet access. Optional Gemini, OpenAI, Groq and OpenRouter connections send model requests to cloud services; the app stores reports, uploads and follow-up conversations locally.

You can ask questions about a completed report or extend a subtopic with further searches that append findings to it. The dashboard shows research progress, and reports export as Markdown or through a print-ready PDF layout. Sharing over a local network or Cloudflare Tunnel gives guests access without exposing the host's saved research, settings or API keys. The host keeps a local log of guest queries.