Alternatives to Scira
An open-source, minimalist AI search engine that finds information on the web and cites its sources. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Scira
An open-source, minimalist AI search engine that finds information on the web and cites its sources.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Scira.
Vane (formerly Perplexica)
Self-hosted, privacy-focused AI search engine with cited answers.
Vane, formerly Perplexica, is an MIT-licensed self-hosted AI search engine that can run fully local models through Ollama, avoiding external model API keys.
Morphic
An open-source AI search engine with a generative interface that you can host yourself.
Morphic is an open-source, self-hostable AI search engine with a generative interface and Docker Compose setup, also needing your own AI and search providers.
Perplexity
An AI answer engine that searches the web and replies with cited sources.
Perplexity is a hosted closed-source answer engine with cited answers and model choice, needing no setup, but advanced features are paid and tracking cookies apply by default.
Felo
A multilingual AI search tool that answers questions and creates slides, mind maps and documents.
Felo is a hosted freemium AI search tool with multilingual search that can also produce slides and mind maps, with no self-hosting.
iAsk.ai
A free AI answer engine that replies to natural-language questions with cited answers.
iAsk.ai is a free hosted answer engine with cited answers on web, iOS and a Chrome extension, closed source and oriented towards student homework.
Kagi
A paid, ad-free web search engine with anti-tracking, result customization and an AI assistant.
Kagi is a paid, closed-source search engine without ads, offering an AI assistant grounded in its results and customizable ranking, with an account required.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Scira as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Metaso AI Search
A Chinese AI search engine that gives ad-free, structured answers, with file upload and slide generation.
Scira is an open-source, minimalist AI search engine with cited answers that can be self-hosted with Docker, but needs external model and search API keys.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
GPT Researcher
An open-source autonomous agent that researches the web and local documents and writes cited reports.
STORM
An open-source LLM system that researches a topic and writes a full-length report with citations.
Local Deep Research
A self-hosted research assistant that runs multi-step searches with local or cloud language models.
You.com
A set of web search APIs that return search results, page contents and grounded answers for AI agents.
Brave Search
A private web search engine built on its own independent index, with optional AI answers.
