Connect any LLM to your internal knowledge sources and chat with it in real time alongside your team. OSS alternative to NotebookLM, Perplexity, and Glean.
SurfSense is a highly customizable AI research agent, connected to external sources such as Search Engines (SearxNG, Tavily, LinkUp), Google Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Linear, Jira, ClickUp, Confluence, BookStack, Gmail, Notion, YouTube, GitHub, Discord, Airtable, Google Calendar, Luma, Circleback, Elasticsearch, Obsidian and more to come.
v0.0.12_demo.mp4
elon_vs_trump_podcast.mp4
- Go to surfsense.com and login.
- Connect your connectors and sync. Enable periodic syncing to keep connectors synced.
- Till connectors data index, upload Documents.
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Once everything is indexed, Ask Away (Use Cases):
- Basic search and citation
- Document Mention QNA
- Report Generations and Exports (PDF, DOCX for now)
- Podcast Generations
- Image Generations
- And more coming soon.
Run SurfSense on your own infrastructure for full data control and privacy.
Quick Start (Docker one-liner):
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -p 8000:8000 -p 5133:5133 -v surfsense-data:/data --name surfsense --restart unless-stopped ghcr.io/modsetter/surfsense:latestAfter starting, open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
Update (Automatic updates with Watchtower):
docker run --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock nickfedor/watchtower --run-once surfsenseFor Docker Compose, manual installation, and other deployment options, check the docs.
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Go to Manage Members page and create an invite.
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Teammate joins and that SearchSpace becomes shared.
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Make chat shared.
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Your team can now chat in realtime.
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Add comment to tag teammates.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| OSS Alternative | Drop in replacement for NotebookLM, Perplexity, and Glean with real time team collaboration |
| 50+ File Formats | Upload documents, images, videos via LlamaCloud, Unstructured, or Docling (local) |
| Hybrid Search | Semantic + Full Text Search with Hierarchical Indices and Reciprocal Rank Fusion |
| Cited Answers | Chat with your knowledge base and get Perplexity style cited responses |
| Deep Agent Architecture | Powered by LangChain Deep Agents planning, subagents, and file system access |
| Universal LLM Support | 100+ LLMs, 6000+ embedding models, all major rerankers via OpenAI spec & LiteLLM |
| Privacy First | Full local LLM support (vLLM, Ollama) your data stays yours |
| Team Collaboration | RBAC with Owner / Admin / Editor / Viewer roles, real time chat & comment threads |
| Podcast Generation | 3 min podcast in under 20 seconds; multiple TTS providers (OpenAI, Azure, Kokoro) |
| Browser Extension | Cross browser extension to save any webpage, including auth protected pages |
| 25+ Connectors | Search Engines, Google Drive, Slack, Teams, Jira, Notion, GitHub, Discord & more |
| Self Hostable | Open source, Docker one liner or full Docker Compose for production |
Full list of External Sources
Search Engines (Tavily, LinkUp) · SearxNG · Google Drive · Slack · Microsoft Teams · Linear · Jira · ClickUp · Confluence · BookStack · Notion · Gmail · YouTube Videos · GitHub · Discord · Airtable · Google Calendar · Luma · Circleback · Elasticsearch · Obsidian, and more to come.
SurfSense is actively being developed. While it's not yet production-ready, you can help us speed up the process.
Join the SurfSense Discord and help shape the future of SurfSense!
Stay up to date with our development progress and upcoming features!
Check out our public roadmap and contribute your ideas or feedback:
Roadmap Discussion: SurfSense 2026 Roadmap
Kanban Board: SurfSense Project Board
All contributions welcome, from stars and bug reports to backend improvements. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.
Thanks to all our Surfers:
