What is GPT Researcher used for?

GPT Researcher is an autonomous research agent that searches the web and local documents using any LLM provider and writes detailed, cited research reports. It is a good fit for market and competitor research reports, literature reviews and topic briefings, and embedding research automation in apps.

Is GPT Researcher open source?

Yes. GPT Researcher is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at assafelovic/gpt-researcher and is written mainly in Python.

Is GPT Researcher free?

Yes. GPT Researcher is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host GPT Researcher?

Yes. GPT Researcher can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is GPT Researcher an alternative to?

GPT Researcher is an open-source alternative to Perplexity, Elicit, Consensus and Genspark. Other open-source alternatives to Perplexity include Scira, Khoj and BrowserOS.

Is GPT Researcher actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to GPT Researcher was on 1 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.7.0, published on 26 September 2026. The project has 30k stars on GitHub.

GPT Researcher: open-source alternative to Perplexity

About GPT Researcher

GPT Researcher is an open-source autonomous agent that performs deep research on a given task and writes up a report with citations. It can work from web sources and from local documents, and it works with any LLM provider, aiming for factual, unbiased output rather than a quick chatbot answer.

The project positions itself against several limits of manual and LLM-only research: manual work can take weeks, models trained on old data may hallucinate, token limits make long reports hard, and a narrow source set leads to shallow or wrong conclusions. Drawing on Plan-and-Solve and RAG ideas, it splits research into planning and parallelized agent work to increase speed and keep behavior stable. Customization options let you tailor domain-specific research agents, and topics note MCP server support.

GPT Researcher is written in Python and Apache-2.0 licensed, with documentation in several languages and a website at gptr.dev. You run it yourself with your own model API keys, and it suits analysts, students and developers who want automated, source-backed reports on a topic.

Key features

Autonomous deep research on any topic
Reports with source citations
Web and local document research
Works with any LLM provider
Parallelized agent work for speed
MCP server support

Good fit for

→Market and competitor research reports
→Literature reviews and topic briefings
→Embedding research automation in apps

Built with: Python
Tags: research-agent; llm; ai-agent; python; web-research; mcp; automation; reports; rag

GPT Researcher: questions and answers

What is GPT Researcher used for?: GPT Researcher is an autonomous research agent that searches the web and local documents using any LLM provider and writes detailed, cited research reports. It is a good fit for market and competitor research reports, literature reviews and topic briefings, and embedding research automation in apps.
Is GPT Researcher open source?: Yes. GPT Researcher is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at assafelovic/gpt-researcher and is written mainly in Python.
Is GPT Researcher free?: Yes. GPT Researcher is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host GPT Researcher?: Yes. GPT Researcher can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is GPT Researcher an alternative to?: GPT Researcher is an open-source alternative to Perplexity, Elicit, Consensus and Genspark. Other open-source alternatives to Perplexity include Scira, Khoj and BrowserOS.
Is GPT Researcher actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to GPT Researcher was on 1 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.7.0, published on 26 September 2026. The project has 30k stars on GitHub.