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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Danswer – Open-source question answering across all your docs

My friend and I have been feeling frustrated at how inefficient it is to find information at work. There are so many tools (Slack, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, Google Drive, etc.) and they provide different (often not great) ways to find information. We thought maybe LLMs could help, so over the last couple months we've been spending a bit of time on the side to build Danswer. It is an open source, self-hosted search tool that allows you to ask questions and get answers across common workspace apps AND your personal documents (via file upload / web scraping)! Full demo here:…

Danswer is an open-source, self-hosted search tool that lets users ask questions and receive answers across multiple workplace applications like Slack, Confluence, GitHub, Jira, and Google Drive, as well as personal… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Danswer – Open-source question answering across all your docs launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1DO

    Danswer is an MIT licensed project that can connect to a wide range of SaaS tools and provide a search/chat (RAG) functionality to help your team discover information and to turn that information into deeper understanding and actionable insights. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cDiv-TShh4 Code here: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer Setup docs: https://docs.danswer.dev/quickstart Danswer is self-hostable and comes ready to use out of the box with a UI, admin features, 20+ auto-syncing connectors, and user/access…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hello HN, I am building Docmost, an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software. It is an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion. I have been working on it for the past 12 months. This is the first public release (beta). The rich-text editor has support for real-time collaboration, LaTex, inline comments, tables, and callouts to name a few. Features - Collaborative real-time editor - Spaces (Teamspace) - User permissions - Groups - Comments - Page history - Nested pages - Search - File attachments You can find screenshots of the product on the website. Website:…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4DO

    Slack questions have always been a huge time sink for me. They’re a distraction that pulls me away from what I’m doing, and often requires digging up old knowledge. If I’m in the middle of something complex, I may take a while to context switch and get around to answering, which leaves the asker blocked for hours. Addressing this seems simple: give an LLM your organizational context and plop it in Slack to answer things for you. So that’s why we built DanswerBot! It’s MIT licensed (https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer) and completely free to use. The bot can…

    2023 · docs.danswer.dev · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    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 →

  6. 6

    An open source, non-profit web search engine. Contribute to mwmbl/mwmbl development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7FS

    Hi HN! This started late last year as an afternoon project to play around with ElasticSearch, and then I kept thinking of new features I wanted to add. I still have a lot of things I want to build, but now seemed like a good time to put it out there: even if the results aren’t nearly the quality I’d like, I’ve still found it useful and I want to show it off! I’ve been working on it since September 2021, but only in fits and starts. The entire thing runs on a computer in my living room (there’s a picture on the About page); I haven’t done any load testing so we’ll see how it holds up.

    2022 · search.feep.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    eesel AI▲374

    ChatGPT over your Slack, Notion, Google Docs & more

    2023 · eesel.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9IB

    Hi all! A few weeks ago I was scrolling through confluence pages trying to find ssh connection details to our integration machine for 40 minutes straight, later I discovered my co-worker slack'ed me the ssh connection string two months ago. So the same weekend I started working on haystack - a search engine for workplace apps. that enables you to search slack, confluence, jira, teams, sharepoint, github, and email in one place. I wanted it to support natural language queries so a query like: "how to connect to integ2 machine?" yields: ssh -i private.pem…

    2023 · haystack.it · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    GetAnswer▲128

    Platform that Integrate ChatGPT with your internal knowledge

    2023 · its alternatives →

  11. 11DF
  12. 12

    Hi HN! I'm Jonathan and I built Hacker Search (https://hackersearch.net), a semantic search engine for Hacker News. Type a keyword or a description of what you're interested in, and you'll get top links from HN surfaced to you along with brief summaries. Unlike HN's otherwise very valuable search feature, Hacker Search doesn't require you to get your keywords exactly right. That's achieved by leveraging OpenAI's latest embedding models alongside more traditional indexes extracted from the scraped and cleaned up contents of the links. I think there are many more interesting things…

    2024 · hackersearch.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hello Hacker News! I built Sleuth, an open source search tool for your workspace. I originally started off with Slack but quickly learned that Confluence search is a well documented problem: https://twitter.com/beajammingh/status/1273742155731791872?s... Sleuth solves this problem using semantic search to find relevant Confluence pages and Slack messages for your query. You can ask Sleuth questions about HR policies, technical documentation, product decisions, and more. Sleuth is open source and can be self-hosted, although there are dependencies on OpenAI and…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14SO

    Hey everyone, We know how hard it can be to ramp up and learn the ins and outs of a new company. - “Who should I talk to about customer onboarding?” - “What was that project the onboarding team shipped in June, that had a massive impact on step 3 completion rate?” Instead of asking someone the same question that’s been asked hundreds of times before, it’s more efficient to find answers in existing documents and past conversations. The problem is, this data is spread out across dozens of workplace apps, with search features that all work differently. That’s why we’ve created Sleuth, an open…

    2023 · getsleuth.xyz · its alternatives →

  15. 15WB

    Kalmia started as a small hobby project about two months ago, but it quickly evolved when we needed a better solution to manage our office's documentation. It has now become our go-to tool for both internal and user-facing docs. Recently, we decided to open source it, as we believe others might benefit from a lightweight, customizable documentation system like this. We're excited to see how the community can take it further, contribute, and adapt it to their own needs!

    2024 · kalmia.difuse.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hey there! Amogh here from eesel (https://eesel.app). eesel filters your browser history to show the docs you need for work, right in your new tab. You can see recent docs, filter by app or search by title or content. We're trying to solve a pretty universal problem. Everyone's work is spread across apps - there's a project brief in Google Docs, issues in Jira, a mockup in Figma, PRs in GitHub - and with this kind of sprawl, it can be a game of trial and error to find the links we need to do our job. Trying keywords in the address bar only works if we remember the title and it's…

    2022 · eesel.app · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi everyone, we’re a small team, supported by Mozilla, who are working on re-imagining a UI for training, tuning and testing local LLMs. Everything is open source. If you’ve been training your own LLMs or have always wanted to, we’d love for you to play with the tool and give feedback on what the future development experience for LLM engineering could look like.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi Hacker News, I developed an open source browser extension for summarizing Hacker News articles with OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs. It currently supports Chrome [1] and Firefox [2] (desktop). The extension adds the summarize buttons to the HN front page and article pages. It is bring-your-own-key, i.e. there's no back end behind it and the usage is free, you insert your API key and pay only for tokens to your LLM provider. [1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-news-tldr/oo... [2]…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    heißdocs▲101

    Open source & self hosted document query engine

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20DU

    We've built this over the last few weeks to leverage vector search and LLMs (this is backed by GPT-3.5, though we're also testing Flan-T5) to answer question over large sets of documents with references. Currently, we've ingested the documentation for React and some key adjacent libraries (Redux, React-Redux, React-Router, MUI). This allows you to ask various natural language questions and the output is hopefully a relevant answer with code examples if applicable, while sourcing the original docs whenever possible. We're working on adding up more documentations and have more "general"…

    2023 · docasker.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Check out this impressive project that enables running LLMs entirely in the browser using WebGPU. Key features: - Zero token costs, no cloud infrastructure required - Complete data privacy through local processing - Simple 3-line code integration - Built on MLC and Transformer.js The benchmarks show smaller models can effectively handle many common tasks. Currently the project roadmap includes: - No-code AI pipeline builder - Browser-based RAG for document chat - Analytics/logging - Model fine-tuning interface

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers. LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that: - Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    (not sure why my previous post didn't appear on Show HN even though I included it in the title, mods please remove if not allowed) Ever applied for a job and never heard back? Many companies just go silent instead of sending rejection emails, leaving you guessing whether to keep waiting or move on. I faced this frustration during my own internship search, especially when there was no real point of contact (automated replies don't count, lol). So, I built didtheyghost.me, a simple open-source tool that crowdsources job application responses. This isn't a job scraper or another job board. It's…

    2025 · didtheyghost.me · its alternatives →

  24. 24ZF

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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 →