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

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