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LocalGPT vs PaperQA2: catalog facts
LocalGPT	PaperQA2
Free Free and open source under the MIT licence.	Free Free and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence; model API usage may cost extra.
Self-hosted	Command line
Documents and queries stay on your own machine Hybrid vector and full-text search with reranking	Answers include citations to the source documents Fetches paper metadata with citation counts and retraction checks
No packaged releases; you set it up from source Requires Ollama and enough hardware for local models	Needs a language model, either through an API or run locally Setup and tuning assume comfort with Python
Self-hosted	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: MIT	License: Apache-2.0
No account needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 26, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.