What is Vane used for?

Vane is a privacy-focused, self-hosted AI answering engine that combines web search via SearxNG with local or cloud language models and cites sources. It is a good fit for private research assistant on your own hardware and searching specific domains or academic papers.

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

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

Can I self-host Vane?

Yes. Vane can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Vane an alternative to?

Vane is an open-source alternative to Perplexity and You.com. Other open-source alternatives to Perplexity include Farfalle, Scira and Morphic.

Is Vane actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Vane was on 1 September 2026, and the latest release is v1.12.2, published on 10 April 2026. The project has 37k stars on GitHub.

Vane: open-source alternative to Perplexity, You.com

About Vane

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.

Key features

Cited AI answers from web search
Local models via Ollama or cloud providers
Speed, Balanced and Quality search modes
SearxNG-powered private web search
File uploads for document questions
Image and video search

Good fit for

→Private research assistant on your own hardware
→Searching specific domains or academic papers

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: ai-search; answering-engine; searxng; llm; rag; ollama; self-hosted; privacy

Vane: questions and answers

What is Vane used for?: Vane is a privacy-focused, self-hosted AI answering engine that combines web search via SearxNG with local or cloud language models and cites sources. It is a good fit for private research assistant on your own hardware and searching specific domains or academic papers.
Is Vane open source?: Yes. Vane is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at ItzCrazyKns/Vane and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Vane free?: Yes. Vane is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Vane?: Yes. Vane can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Vane an alternative to?: Vane is an open-source alternative to Perplexity and You.com. Other open-source alternatives to Perplexity include Farfalle, Scira and Morphic.
Is Vane actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Vane was on 1 September 2026, and the latest release is v1.12.2, published on 10 April 2026. The project has 37k stars on GitHub.