AI-powered research notebook with full privacy control
- Stars
- 40.4k
- Growth
- +1.1k
- Launched
- Oct 2024
MITupdated today
R.I.P.Open-source alternatives to NotebookLM
6 projects replace NotebookLM, the AI research notebook. 2 shipped code in the last 30 days.
NotebookLM is free with a Google account, with higher limits in Google's paid plans. People leave because every source is uploaded to Google and the model behind it cannot be changed. Researchers working with confidential papers or client files often are not allowed to use it at all.
Open Notebook is the closest copy, with sources, notes and podcast-style audio, running on any model provider you configure. SurfSense pulls in sources from tools like Slack, Notion and GitHub next to uploaded files. Kotaemon is a cleaner document Q&A app that cites its sources. Podcastfy does one job: turning text, PDFs or web pages into a two-voice audio conversation.
6 open-source alternatives
Most-starred first. Stars, growth and activity are live from GitHub.
An open-source RAG-based tool for chatting with your documents.
- Stars
- 25.8k
- Growth
- –
- Launched
- Mar 2024
Apache-2.0updated 3mo ago
Privacy-first knowledge base with any AI model you choose
- Stars
- 16.5k
- Growth
- +364
- Launched
- Jul 2024
Apache-2.0updated 1d ago
An Open Source Python alternative to NotebookLM's podcast feature: Transforming Multimodal Content into Captivating Multilingual Audio…
- Stars
- 6.7k
- Growth
- –
- Launched
- Sep 2024
Apache-2.0updated 5mo ago
Browser and notebook combined with local-first AI
- Stars
- 3.6k
- Growth
- +32
- Launched
- Oct 2025
Apache-2.0updated 1mo ago
A fully open-source, LlamaCloud-backed alternative to NotebookLM
- Stars
- 2k
- Growth
- 4/day
- Launched
- Jun 2025
MITupdated 7mo ago
What you give up by leaving NotebookLM
The honest part. Free and open usually costs something else.
- Flatter audio overviews NotebookLM's generated podcasts sound natural; open versions depend on your speech model and often sound flatter.
- Setup required You install an app and connect a model provider instead of opening a browser tab.
- Source handling varies Google reads PDFs, slides and YouTube videos well; open tools differ in which formats they handle.
- Sharing takes hosting Sharing a notebook is a link in NotebookLM and a server setup in most alternatives.
