Perplexica alternatives for teams: why Kortix is the open source one

What Perplexica gives one person

Perplexica is the open source answering engine people reach for when they want Perplexity-style answers without handing their questions to a hosted service. The project now ships as Vane, and its own repository calls it an AI-powered answering engine that runs entirely on your own hardware. It reads local models through Ollama, and it can reach cloud providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Groq. SearxNG handles the web search, so a query can stay on your machine.

What a team needs beyond search

One person asking questions and reading cited answers is a solved problem. A team adds requirements around the same engine: seats and sign-in so people share one instance, memory that carries context between sessions, connectors into the tools the work already lives in, and a review step before anything changes. A single answering box carries no roles, no audit trail and no way to keep two people's work apart.

The open source alternatives, defined

Three open source projects come up most often, and each solves a different job. Vane, formerly Perplexica, is a personal answering engine over the web and uploaded files. Open WebUI is a self-hosted AI interface for a team, with roles, groups and per-group access, that runs entirely offline. Khoj is a self-hostable second brain over your own documents, from a personal install up to an enterprise deployment. All three run the software yourself, and none of them puts the agents, skills, memory and connector configuration of a company in one repo it owns. The comparison table on this page sets them side by side.

When an answering engine is enough

If one person needs private, cited answers over the web, Vane does the job on your own hardware, and its repository still lists authentication among the features it plans to add (checked October 2026). Open WebUI fits a team that wants a self-hosted chat and agent layer with roles and groups. Khoj fits a person or a small group building a searchable second brain over their own documents. Reach for one of these when the job is questions and answers.

When a team should own the system

Once the job is producing finished work, a search box stops being the right layer. A report, a code change or a reply sent from a tool needs the system around it: the agents that do the work, the memory they share, the connectors they reach through, the permissions that bound them, and a review step that lands the result. That layer is what Kortix holds.

What Kortix is

Kortix is the open source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with each session running on its own cloud computer. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network, and self-host is free. Any model provider with your own keys, or the ChatGPT plan you already pay for. Open source. Read it, fork it, audit it. Start with Kortix, or read the source through Kortix on GitHub.

How a team starts with Kortix

Three commands build the repo and bring it live. The CLI installs on any machine, and the same project defines the agents and the tools they may reach.

curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bashkortix initkortix ship