What is SwarmVault used for?

SwarmVault is a local-first, MIT-licensed knowledge base that turns documents, code and URLs into a markdown wiki and graph for people and AI agents. It is a good fit for personal knowledge management, persistent memory for coding agents and RAG knowledge base over project docs.

Is SwarmVault open source?

Yes. SwarmVault is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at swarmclawai/swarmvault and is written mainly in TypeScript.

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

Can I self-host SwarmVault?

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

What is SwarmVault an alternative to?

SwarmVault is an open-source alternative to Obsidian. Other open-source alternatives to Obsidian include NoteGen, Logseq and IWE.

Is SwarmVault actively maintained?

The most recent commit to SwarmVault was on 30 June 2026, and the latest release is v3.20.0, published on 12 June 2026. The project has 708 stars on GitHub.

SwarmVault: open-source alternative to Obsidian

About SwarmVault

SwarmVault is a local-first tool that ingests documents, code, transcripts, notes and URLs and compiles them into a durable markdown wiki plus a machine-readable knowledge graph. It follows a pattern described by Andrej Karpathy for LLM-maintained wikis and is positioned as an Obsidian alternative for personal knowledge management and as a persistent memory store for coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex.

A vault on disk holds immutable raw sources, generated wiki pages, graph reports, a graph data file and a local search index. The quickstart command initializes a vault, ingests a file, directory or public GitHub repository, builds the wiki and graph, and opens a local graph viewer. A built-in heuristic provider runs offline without API keys for the first run, MCP server support lets agents query the vault, and context packs and review workflows are available for deeper use.

SwarmVault is a TypeScript project released under the MIT license, with documentation in English first and README translations in Chinese and Japanese. Since everything lives in files on your own machine, it is self-hosted by design.

Key features

Ingests documents, code, transcripts and URLs
Generates a markdown wiki from sources
Builds a queryable local knowledge graph
Local search index for retrieval
Offline heuristic provider needs no API keys
MCP server integration for AI agents
Graph viewer and shareable summary cards

Good fit for

→Personal knowledge management
→Persistent memory for coding agents
→RAG knowledge base over project docs

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: knowledge-graph; local-first; llm-wiki; rag; pkm; mcp; agent-memory; markdown

SwarmVault: questions and answers

What is SwarmVault used for?: SwarmVault is a local-first, MIT-licensed knowledge base that turns documents, code and URLs into a markdown wiki and graph for people and AI agents. It is a good fit for personal knowledge management, persistent memory for coding agents and RAG knowledge base over project docs.
Is SwarmVault open source?: Yes. SwarmVault is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at swarmclawai/swarmvault and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is SwarmVault free?: Yes. SwarmVault is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host SwarmVault?: Yes. SwarmVault can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is SwarmVault an alternative to?: SwarmVault is an open-source alternative to Obsidian. Other open-source alternatives to Obsidian include NoteGen, Logseq and IWE.
Is SwarmVault actively maintained?: The most recent commit to SwarmVault was on 30 June 2026, and the latest release is v3.20.0, published on 12 June 2026. The project has 708 stars on GitHub.