AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Airgapped Offline RAG – Run LLMs Locally with Llama, Mistral, & Gemini
I've built an airgapped Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for question-answering on documents, running entirely offline with local inference. Using Llama 3, Mistral, and Gemini, this setup allows secure, private NLP on your own machine. Perfect for researchers, data scientists, and developers who need to process sensitive data without cloud dependencies. Built with Llama C++, LangChain, and Streamlit, it supports quantized models and provides a sleek UI for document processing. Check it out, contribute, or suggest new features!
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Airgapped Offline RAG – Run LLMs Locally with Llama, Mistral, & Gemini launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

I've built an advanced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline from scratch to demystify the complex mechanics of modern LLM-powered Question Answering systems. This repository features: -- An implementation of a sub-question query engine from scratch to answer complex user questions. -- Illustrative explanations that unveil the inner workings of the system. -- An analysis of the challenges I faced while working with the system, like prompt engineering and cost estimation. -- Qualitative comparison with similar frameworks like LlamaIndex, offering a broader perspective. Key Takeaway:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

I spent the last few days building out a nicer ChatGPT-like interface to use Mistral 7B and Llama 3 fully within a browser (no deps and installs). I’ve used the WebLLM project by MLC AI for a while to interact with LLMs in the browser when handling sensitive data but I found their UI quite lacking for serious use so I built a much better interface around WebLLM. I’ve been using it as a therapist and coach. And it’s wonderful knowing that my personal information never leaves my local computer. Should work on Desktop with Chrome or Edge. Other browsers are adding WebGPU support as well - see…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...
2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →
- 5

Hey hacker news, We’re the cofounders at Psychic.dev (http://psychic.dev) where we help companies connect LLMs to private data. With the launch of Llama 2, we think it’s finally viable to self-host an internal application that’s on-par with ChatGPT, so we did exactly that and made it an open source project. We also included a vector DB and API server so you can upload files and connect Llama 2 to your own data. The RAG in RAGstack stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation, a technique where the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) are augmented by retrieving information…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

I've been playing around with https://github.com/zphang/minimal-llama/ and https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py, and wanted to create a simple UI where you can just paste text, tweak the parameters, and finetune the model quickly using a modern GPU. To prepare the data, simply separate your text with two blank lines. There's an inference tab, so you can test how the tuned model behaves. This is my first foray into the world of LLM finetuning, Python, Torch, Transformers, LoRA, PEFT, and Gradio. Enjoy!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

- 8

Hi HN! I lead product at Vectara and we've just released a new LLM in our platform that outperforms GPT4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro on RAG tasks. Vectara is a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) platform primarily deployed as a SaaS service which includes a generous free tier so you can try it for free. The way we've been able to offer a "better but cheaper" is that we focus a lot of our attention on taking smaller models (which can be hosted in a cost efficient way) and fine tuning them to specific tasks: in this case RAG. This ends up with a model that is less capable of arbitrary tasks like…
2024 · vectara.com · its alternatives →
- 9IB
We show the potential of modern, embedded graph databases in the browser by demonstrating a fully in-browser chatbot that can perform Graph RAG using Kuzu (the graph database we're building) and WebLLM, a popular in-browser inference engine for LLMs. The post retrieves from the graph via a Text-to-Cypher pipeline that translates a user question into a Cypher query, and the LLM uses the retrieved results to synthesize a response. As LLMs get better, and WebGPU and Wasm64 become more widely adopted, we expect to be able to do more and more in the browser in combination with LLMs, so a lot of…
2025 · blog.kuzudb.com · its alternatives →
- 10

I built a proof-of-concept for running RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) entirely in the browser using WebGPU. You can chat with PDF documents using models like Phi-3, Llama 3, or Mistral 7B - all running locally with zero backend. Documents never leave your device. Tech stack: - WebLLM + WeInfer (optimized fork with ~3.76x speedup) - Transformers.js for embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) - IndexedDB as vector store - PDF.js for parsing The main challenges were: 1. Getting esbuild to bundle without choking on onnxruntime-node 2. Managing COOP/COEP headers for SharedArrayBuffer 3. Keeping…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
NobodyWho▲106Hey, Hello, we are the team behind NobodyWho; an open-source plugin that embeds large language models functionality inside Unity and Godot games - completely locally and offline. We try to make it as easy and user friendly as possible to use our plugin, so feel free to create an issue on our GitHub if you have any inconveniences - and we will try to improve it! So why might this interest you: - Written in Rust with llama.cpp bindings and optional GPU back-ends (Vulkan / Metal) for fast inference. - Drop-in nodes / components: add a model asset and a chat or embedding node and get a…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

hey hn, I built an open-source Perplexity clone that can run local LLMs and cloud LLMs. It's fully self-hostable through Docker and uses ollama to support local LLMs. The demo video in the repository shows me running it locally with llama3 on my M1 Macbook Pro. I'm open to any suggestions or feedback, thanks!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

I wrote a small local tool to transcribe audio notes (Whisper/Parakeet). Code: https://github.com/bilawalriaz/lazy-notes I wanted to process raw transcripts locally without OpenRouter. Llama 3.2 3B with a prompt was decent but incomplete, so I tried SFT. I fine-tuned Llama 3.2 3B to clean/analyze dictation and emit structured JSON (title, tags, entities, dates, actions). Data: 13 real memos → Kimi K2 gold JSON → ~40k synthetic + gold; keys canonicalized. Chutes.ai (5k req/day). Training: RTX 4090 24GB, ~4h, LoRA (r=128, α=128, dropout=0.05), max seq 2048,…
2025 · bilawal.net · its alternatives →
- 14

Lately, I've been tinkering with llama.cpp and the ollama server. The speed of these tools caught my attention, even on my modest 4060 setup. I was quite impressed with the generation quality of models like Mistral. But I was a bit unhappy at the same time because whenever I explore a topic, there is a lot of typing involved when using the chat interface. So I needed a tool to not only give a response but also generate a set of "suggestions" which can be explored further just by clicking. My experience in front-end development is limited. Nonetheless, I tinkered together a small web app to…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

Hello HN! I wanted to share a side project of mine: a fully standalone app that uses a local LLM (specifically Mistral 7B) for document interaction using RAG. It supports a wide variety of document types and is designed to run right after installation. There are still quite a few bugs to iron out and many features I'm excited to add. Considering this is my first time working on such a project, I'm really happy with the progress and am learning a ton! The project is open source, so I please feel free to check out my work and leave any feedback :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16

Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17IB
Hey all! I wanted to share this project I've been working on that can maybe help you or your developer friends out. I built a RAG system for our product a while back and didn't realize how easy they were to get started. So I put together my learnings into this online course. It's not quite ready but if you sign up and mention HackerNews, I can get you early access. I'm looking to get feedback on the following: (1) materials — is it engaging & did you learn something? (2) UI/UX of the platform — did you have any issues that prevented you from starting or finishing the tutorial? (3)…
2024 · takehomes.com · its alternatives →
- 18

Henry, Matt and James here – we’re building an open source toolkit that makes it easy to integrate an LLM-powered copilot that talks to your API into software products. It works by calling API endpoints which you choose to expose to it. This lets the chatbot complete tasks within your software in response to natural language queries. It’s also open source, so you don’t have to send user data to another 3rd party. We support Llama 2, but we haven’t fine-tuned Llama 2 yet (coming soon) so highest accuracy is seen with GPT-4 or fine-tuned GPT-3.5 (much faster). We started working together 2…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

Hey HN! If you’re at all interested in LLMs/LLM-apps, you’ve probably heard of RAG: Retrieval-Assisted Generation, i.e. retrieving relevant documents to give to your LLM as context to answer user queries. Today, I’m releasing RAGatouille v0.0.1, whose aim is to make it as easy as can be to improve your RAG pipelines by leveraging state-of-the-art Information Retrieval research. As of right now, there’s quite a big gap between common everyday practice and the IR literature, and a lot of the gap is because there just aren’t good ways to quickly try out and leverage SotA IR techniques.…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

We’ve just launched Gradient — an API that helps you build private LLMs that you own. We simplify inference and fine-tuning on open-source LLMs such as llama2, and you only pay by the token. Our API platform makes it possible for you to create private models with a single API call. Run inference on your fine tuned model instantly with no cold boot (and no need to pay for compute costs). The product is truly on demand - when you run fine tuning and inference on our platform, there's nearly 0 startup latency for these API calls. And you're not paying for the compute, you just pay for the…
2023 · gradient.ai · its alternatives →
- 21
Storyblok▲11i’ve been experimenting with building a fully local rag pipeline: weaviate for vectors + hybrid search, node.js scripts, qwen 3.5 on ollama what i found is that most of the challenges live in retrieval and chunking, not the LLM, and a good chunking strategy + the right balance in hybrid search is more effective than using a bigger and more expensive model
2022 · storyblok.com · its alternatives →
- 22

We are the developers of Phoenix, which we released in April of this year with a goal of bringing LLM observability to the notebook. In the time since, the growth of LLM frameworks and complex agent workflows led us to add support for LLM spans and traces and introduce a simple Eval harness for testing the data from those spans. The latest Traces & Spans release of Phoenix offers: -Out of the box tracing for LlamaIndex and LangChain -Fully local execution, no data sent anywhere, outside of your own LLM calls -Ability to get a common dataframe format across frameworks back to a notebook for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23IB
Hey HN, I built a website where you can train Llama 3.1 8b & 70b (4bit) on your data. I use unsloth in the backend and the training is done on H100s which I rent programmatically from Runpod. I'd love some feedback. If you would be interested in using it feel free to book a chat with me: cal.com/hamada/tunellama-intro Happy to give you free credits :) P.S. I'm also looking for a co-founder as I have big plans for this.
2024 · tunellama.com · its alternatives →
- 24

- Discovering the most effective RAG pipeline for your specific data and use case can be daunting. It requires experimenting with various RAG modules and configurations, which are both time-consuming and complex. - AutoRAG addresses this challenge by automatically evaluating different combinations of RAG modules and their parameters. You don't need to write implementation code yourself; everything is set up through a single YAML file. - Our aim is to save you the hassle of continuously adapting to new RAG modules and configurations. Instead, you can focus on developing robust data for your…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →