Open-source You.com alternatives

Vane is an AI answering engine that runs on your own hardware. It combines information from the internet with support for local language models through Ollama and cloud providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and Groq, and returns answers with cited sources while keeping searches private. Repository topics also reference Perplexica.

Search modes trade speed for depth: Speed Mode for quick answers, Balanced Mode for everyday queries and Quality Mode for deeper research. Sources can be the web, discussions or academic papers, and web search is powered by SearxNG, which queries multiple search engines without exposing your identity. Image and video search, domain-restricted search and file uploads for questions about PDFs, text files and images are included.

Other features include widgets for quick lookups like weather, calculations and stock prices, search suggestions as you type, a Discover feed of articles, and a saved search history. Vane is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, and its architecture is documented for readers who want to understand how it works.

Morphic is an AI-powered search engine with a generative user interface. It answers questions with sources attached, and instead of returning plain markdown it renders richer inline components such as source-credited images, grids and headings built from a streamed specification.

It supports Quick and Adaptive search modes and lets you pick from several model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Ollama, as well as OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Search can run through Tavily, SearXNG, Brave or Exa. Chat history is stored in PostgreSQL, results can be shared through unique URLs, files can be uploaded, and Supabase Auth handles sign-in, with a guest mode for anonymous use.

Morphic is built with Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS under the Apache-2.0 licence. A Docker Compose setup starts PostgreSQL, Redis, SearXNG and the app together, so no separate search API key is required, although at least one AI provider key must be configured. It can also be deployed to Vercel.

Scira, formerly called MiniPerplx, is a minimalistic AI search tool that finds information online and cites where it came from. The project describes it as an agentic research platform that plans, retrieves and cites, and it is available as a hosted site at scira.ai.

You can start by asking a question, uploading a PDF or pasting a link. Behind it, the README credits the Vercel AI SDK for model integration and streaming, Exa AI for web search and content retrieval, and Upstash for serverless Redis and rate limiting. It is written in TypeScript as a web app you can run yourself with your own provider keys.

Scira is licensed under AGPL-3.0, so modified versions offered over a network must share their source. It suits developers who want a reference AI search app to run or adapt, and individuals who want a cited, minimalistic alternative to conventional search.

Farfalle is an open-source AI-powered search engine, described by its creator as a Perplexity clone, that lets you search the web and get synthesized answers. It is aimed at developers and privacy-minded users who want to self-host this kind of search experience and choose their own model provider rather than depend on a closed commercial service.

It supports local models through Ollama, such as Llama 3, Mistral, Gemma and Phi-3, custom models through LiteLLM, and cloud models including Groq-hosted Llama 3 and OpenAI's GPT-4o. Search results can come from multiple providers, including Tavily, SearXNG, Serper or Bing, and the project supports chat history, an agent mode that plans and executes a search for better results, and expert search.

The stack uses Next.js for the frontend and FastAPI for the backend, with Redis for rate limiting and shadcn/ui components. Running it locally requires Docker and, for local models, Ollama; API keys for search and cloud model providers are optional depending on which features are used. Farfalle is written in TypeScript and released under the Apache-2.0 license, with a cloud-model-only live demo available.