SurfSense: An Open-Source AI Research Agent
SurfSense is a highly customizable AI research agent designed to enhance research capabilities by integrating with personal knowledge bases and a wide array of external data sources. As an open-source alternative to proprietary tools like NotebookLM, Perplexity, and Glean, it empowers users to conduct in-depth research on any topic or query while maintaining control over their data and privacy. Unlike standalone research tools, SurfSense elevates the experience by seamlessly connecting to real-time external integrations, making it ideal for individuals, teams, and organizations seeking a private, extensible solution.
Core Functionality
At its heart, SurfSense allows users to build and interact with a personal knowledge base. Users can upload and process content from various file formats—supporting over 50 extensions through ETL services like LlamaCloud, Unstructured, and Docling. This includes documents (PDF, DOCX, RTF), presentations (PPTX, ODP), spreadsheets (XLSX, CSV), images (JPG, PNG), audio/video (MP3, MP4), and even emails (EML). Once ingested, the system enables powerful semantic and full-text search, allowing quick retrieval of information from saved content.
A standout feature is the natural language chat interface, where users can converse with their knowledge base to get insightful, cited answers—mirroring the citation style of Perplexity. This is powered by advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, including hierarchical indices (a two-tiered RAG setup), hybrid search (combining semantic and full-text with Reciprocal Rank Fusion), and support for over 100 LLMs and 6000+ embedding models. Rerankers like Pinecone, Cohere, and Flashrank further refine results for relevance.
Integrations and External Sources
SurfSense's extensibility shines through its broad ecosystem integrations. It connects to search engines such as Tavily, LinkUp, and self-hosted SearxNG for real-time web research. Productivity tools like Slack, Linear (issue tracking), Jira, ClickUp (project management), Confluence, BookStack (wiki), Gmail, Notion (notes), YouTube (video transcripts), GitHub (repos), Discord (channels), Airtable (databases), Google Calendar (events), Luma (AI video), and Elasticsearch are all supported, with more planned. This allows users to pull in live data from their workflows, creating a unified research environment.
For teams, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables secure collaboration: roles like Owner, Admin, Editor, and Viewer control access to search spaces, documents, chats, connectors, and settings. Knowledge bases can be shared organization-wide without compromising privacy.
Specialized Features
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Privacy and Local Deployment: Fully self-hostable with Docker or manual setups, SurfSense works offline with local LLMs via Ollama, ensuring data stays private. No cloud dependency required.
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Podcast Generation: A blazing-fast agent converts chats or research into 3-minute podcasts in under 20 seconds. Supports local TTS (Kokoro) and cloud providers (OpenAI, Azure, Google Vertex AI) for engaging audio content.
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Browser Extension: A Chrome extension (Manifest v3 on Plasmo) lets users save authenticated webpages directly to their knowledge base, bypassing login barriers.
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Advanced Tech Stack: Backend built on FastAPI, PostgreSQL with pgvector for vector search, SQLAlchemy, LangGraph and LangChain for AI agents, LiteLLM for model integration, Celery for async tasks, and Redis as a broker. Frontend uses Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and more for a modern UI.
Getting Started and Deployment
Deployment is straightforward: Use the quick Docker command for local runs, including bundled PostgreSQL and Redis. For production, Docker Compose offers scalability with pgAdmin for DB management. Cloud option available at surfsense.com for no-setup trials. Prerequisites include optional API keys for ETL (e.g., Unstructured.io) and auth setups.
Roadmap and Community
Actively developed, SurfSense has a public GitHub Projects roadmap for feature tracking. With 11k+ stars, it's gaining traction. Join the Discord for contributions, from code to issues. Future enhancements focus on more integrations and production readiness.
In summary, SurfSense democratizes advanced AI research by combining personal knowledge management with enterprise-grade integrations, all in an open-source package that's privacy-first and highly extensible.
