About Open Notebook
Open Notebook is a privacy-oriented, open-source option for people who want something like Google's NotebookLM for researching and learning with AI. It is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license. The project describes itself as private, multi-model and fully local, so your research material stays on infrastructure you control instead of a single cloud provider.
It supports more than a dozen AI providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama and LM Studio, and lets you organize multimodal content such as PDFs, videos, audio and web pages. Features include podcasts with several speakers, keyword and vector search over everything you add, and chat conversations grounded in your own sources. The interface is available in several languages, including Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Bengali.
The README compares Open Notebook with Google NotebookLM across privacy and control, choice of AI provider and more, and links a getting-started guide, user guide, feature list and deployment instructions. A Discord server is open for help and workflow ideas. It suits students, researchers and knowledge workers who want a NotebookLM-style workflow with their own choice of models.
Key features
- Self-hosted NotebookLM-style research notebooks
- Support for many AI providers and local models
- PDFs, video, audio and web page sources
- Multi-speaker podcast generation
- Full-text and vector search
- Chat grounded in your sources
- Interface in multiple languages
Good fit for
- →Private research notebooks
- →Turning documents into podcasts
- →Studying with AI using local models
- Built with
- TypeScript
- Tags
- notebooklm-alternative
- research
- note-taking
- ai
- self-hosted
- privacy
- podcast
- typescript
Open Notebook: questions and answers
- What is Open Notebook used for?
- Open Notebook is a privacy-focused, self-hosted alternative to Google's NotebookLM that supports many AI providers, multimodal sources, podcast generation and search. It is a good fit for private research notebooks, turning documents into podcasts and studying with AI using local models.
- Is Open Notebook open source?
- Yes. Open Notebook is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at lfnovo/open-notebook and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Open Notebook free?
- Yes. Open Notebook is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Open Notebook?
- Yes. Open Notebook can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What is Open Notebook an alternative to?
- Open Notebook is an open-source alternative to NotebookLM, Mem, ChatPDF and SciSpace. Other open-source alternatives to NotebookLM include SurfSense, AnythingLLM and Khoj.
- Is Open Notebook actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Open Notebook was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.14.0, published on 21 July 2026. The project has 40k stars on GitHub.
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