Scira
An open-source, minimalist AI search engine that finds information on the web and cites its sources.
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About Scira
Scira, formerly called MiniPerplx, is a minimal AI search engine in the style of answer engines such as Perplexity. It searches the internet, writes an answer and cites the sources it used.
The project is built on the Vercel AI SDK and ships with a Dockerfile and docker-compose configuration, so it can be run on your own server with your own model API keys. The repository is actively developed, with hundreds of commits and a large following on GitHub.
Strengths
- Cited answers from web search
- Docker and docker-compose files for self-hosting
- Clean, minimal interface
- Active development with a large community
Limitations
- Needs external AI model and search API keys
- Self-hosting requires some technical setup
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree to self-host; you supply your own AI model and search API keys.
- License
- Open source, license not stated
- Developer
- Zaid Mukaddam
- Platforms
- Web, Self-hosted
- How it runs
- Self-hosted
- Works offline
- No
- Best suited for
- Developers who want a self-hosted Perplexity-style search engine
- Categories
- AI research, AI agents
- Last verified
- Added
Alternatives to Scira
Compare allSoftware that can replace Scira for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
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.
Scira as an alternative
Listings that name Scira as an alternative.
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 necessarily 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.
