AI tools · Updated October 2026
Perplexity is an AI answer engine that searches the web and cites its sources. If you would rather own your tools, here are 5 open source alternatives to Perplexity, ranked by GitHub stars. Each one is free to use under its license, and you can read, change, and often self-host the code.
The most popular is Khoj with 37.8k stars, and the most recently updated is SurfSense, with a commit on Oct 21, 2026.
by khoj-ai
Your AI second brain. Self-hostable. Get answers from the web or your docs. Build custom agents, schedule automations, do deep research. Turn any online or local LLM into your personal, autonomous …
by ItzCrazyKns
Vane is an AI-powered answering engine.
by MODSetter
Air-gapped, privacy-focused, open-source NotebookLM alternative. AI agent that researches, transforms, and edits your documents. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/ejRNvftDp9
by zaidmukaddam
Scira (Formerly MiniPerplx) is a minimalistic AI-powered search engine that helps you find information on the internet and cites it too. Powered by Vercel AI SDK!
by miurla
An AI-powered search engine with a generative UI
By GitHub stars, Khoj is the most popular open source alternative to Perplexity right now, with 37.8k stars, followed by Vane and SurfSense. The best fit depends on your setup, so compare their licenses, languages, and recent activity in the table above.
Yes. All 5 projects on this page are open source, so the software itself is free to use, study, and change. Some of them also sell a hosted version or paid support.
SurfSense (last commit Oct 21, 2026), Morphic (last commit Oct 21, 2026), and Vane (last commit Sep 1, 2026) have the most recent commits. Licenses on this list include AGPL-3.0, MIT, and Apache-2.0.
Khoj
Vane
SurfSense
Scira
Morphic