Open source alternatives to Perplexity

By GitHub stars it is Khoj, with 38,125 stars and a commit on 2 Aug. Choose Khoj when you want cited web answers from a self-hosted app that can also switch to offline open-weight models. Next come Co-STORM (31,876 stars) and Scira (11,947 stars).

Yes. The code of all 6 is public under AGPL 3.0, MIT or Apache 2.0, so you can use them with no licence fee. Running one yourself costs the server and your time to look after it, and some makers also sell a hosted plan.

Start from the job you use Perplexity for. Choose Scira when you want open source code you can run and change yourself. Choose Co-STORM when you want a free multi-agent tool that researches a topic with you and writes a long cited report.

4 of the 6: Khoj, Morphic, MiroThinker and PokeeResearch 7B. Each tool's page says what it needs to run.

1 of the 6 we track had a commit in the last 30 days, among them Morphic. The quietest is Co-STORM, last changed on 30 Sep 2025. A recent commit shows the project is kept up, not that it will stay that way.

Apache 2.0 (3), AGPL 3.0 (2), MIT (1). MIT, BSD and Apache let you change and reuse the code freely. GPL and AGPL ask you to share your changes under the same licence when you give the software to others, and AGPL also counts letting people use it over a network.

The hosting. Perplexity's maker runs the servers for you; with an open source tool the updates, backups, security fixes and support are yours, unless you take the maker's hosted plan. Features differ too, so check what each one imports and exports before you move your data.