Alternatives to LocalGPT
A self-hosted tool for asking questions about your own documents using local language models. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
LocalGPT
A self-hosted tool for asking questions about your own documents using local language models.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as LocalGPT.
AnythingLLM
A desktop AI app that answers questions about your own documents, with no account and no API key needed.
AnythingLLM is an MIT licensed desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux with packaged installers, bundling chat, vector database and document pipeline instead of a from-source setup.
GPT4All
A local AI chat app with document chat built in, from Nomic AI. Stable, MIT licensed, but not updated since early 2025.
GPT4All offers LocalDocs document questions in an MIT licensed desktop app that runs on CPU without Ollama, though its latest release dates from February 2025.
Kotaemon
An open-source, self-hosted RAG app for chatting with your documents using local or hosted models.
Kotaemon is an open-source self-hosted RAG app with a web interface and Docker deployment, and it works with hosted models as well as local ones.
PrivateGPT
A self-hosted API layer for building private AI applications on top of local language models.
PrivateGPT is an API layer for document question answering that works with any OpenAI-compatible inference server rather than Ollama, adding tools, MCP and text-to-SQL for developers.
Open WebUI
A self-hosted chat interface that talks to Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible API, so your local models get a proper front end.
Open WebUI adds document upload and retrieval to a multi-user chat interface for Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs, but its licence adds a branding condition.
Khoj
Open-source AI second brain that researches across your documents and the web with any model.
Khoj is an AGPL-3.0 self-hostable assistant that searches your documents and the web with local or remote models and supports scheduled automations and agents.
SurfSense
An open-source, self-hostable research agent and NotebookLM alternative that answers questions over your documents.
SurfSense is a self-hostable NotebookLM alternative that answers over documents and connected sources, can run air-gapped, and ships with Docker deployment and an MCP server.
Open Notebook
Self-hosted, open source alternative to Google's NotebookLM.
Open Notebook is an MIT licensed self-hosted NotebookLM alternative for working with your own sources, with privacy depending on the configured model provider.
Also worth comparing
These listings name LocalGPT as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
FastGPT
A self-hostable platform for building knowledge-base question answering and AI workflows on top of LLMs.
LocalGPT is an MIT-licensed tool for private document Q&A with hybrid search and Ollama models, but it has no packaged releases and is set up from source.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Ollama
The simplest way to pull down an open language model and run it on your own machine, from one command or a desktop app.
Docling
Open source library that converts documents into AI-ready structured formats.
MinerU
A document parser that converts PDFs, Office files and scans into Markdown and JSON.
Local Deep Research
A self-hosted research assistant that runs multi-step searches with local or cloud language models.
olmOCR
Open-source toolkit that uses a vision language model to turn PDFs and scans into Markdown.
