Khoj
Open-source personal AI assistant that searches and chats over your notes, documents, and web history - 20,000+ GitHub stars, free to self-host.
Khoj is an open-source AI personal assistant that connects to your existing knowledge - Obsidian notes, Notion pages, PDFs, org files, and browser history - and lets you search and have conversations over it all in one place. It runs locally for complete privacy or on Khoj cloud for convenience, and supports multiple AI models including GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and local models via Ollama. Founded in 2021 by Debanjum Singh Solanky, Khoj has accumulated 20,000+ GitHub stars and built a community of developers and knowledge workers who want an AI assistant that knows their own documents rather than just the public internet. The cloud version is free to start and the self-hosted version is completely free.
Key Features
- Index and chat over Obsidian notes, Notion pages, PDFs, Markdown files, and browser history
- Multi-model support - switch between GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and local models via Ollama per conversation
- Fully self-hostable on Docker for complete data privacy with no third-party cloud access
- Obsidian plugin and Emacs integration for querying the AI directly inside your note-taking workflow
- Image understanding - upload screenshots or diagrams and ask questions about their content
- Agent mode that researches topics and compiles answers from both personal documents and the web
- API access for integrating personal knowledge search into other applications
Use Cases
- Researchers building a personal knowledge base that they can query conversationally across hundreds of papers
- Developers self-hosting a private AI assistant over company documentation without sending data to external APIs
- Writers querying their own notes, drafts, and research archives with natural language questions
- Knowledge workers connecting Obsidian vaults to an AI that understands their personal thinking and writing
Pros
- Self-hosting option provides genuine data privacy - documents never leave your own infrastructure
- 20,000+ GitHub stars and active community mean reliable development and extensive community plugins
- Multi-model support lets users choose the best AI for each task without switching platforms
Cons
- Self-hosted setup requires Docker knowledge and ongoing maintenance compared to fully managed alternatives
- Index freshness depends on scheduled re-indexing - very recent documents may not appear in searches
- Pro cloud plan at $25/month is competitive but expensive relative to fully self-hosted free operation
Khoj Alternatives
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Recall.ai
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