AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Open-source Perplexity clone one file back end, streaming answers

I built an open-source research agent. You ask a question, it searches the web via Tavily, synthesizes an answer with an LLM, and shows the sources it used. Answers stream in real-time. The interesting part is the backend. It's a single JS file (~100 lines) that handles web search, LLM streaming, and per-user conversation history. No vector database, no Redis, no separate storage service. It runs inside a cell — an isolated environment with a built-in database, search index, and filesystem. The cell handles persistence and streaming natively, so the agent code only has to deal with the…

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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.

1
I've built a locally running Perplexity clonefree▲669
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 →
2
Tabstack Web Research▲168
Run a research agent with cited answers in a single API call
Jun 2026 · tabstack.ai · its alternatives →
3
Perplexity Labs▲638
We built a search engine interface on top of OpenAI GPT 3.5 and Microsoft Bing that summarizes and cites top search results in response to natural language questions. By using search results, the AI is able to reference recent news and provide citations for specific facts. Our interface offers concise answers, without having to click through links, scroll past irrelevant content, or read ads. No login is required; no personal data is collected. We believe in the power of combining the intuitive UI of web search with the intelligence of large language models. The search engine does indexing…
2025 · perplexity.ai · its alternatives →
4
Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)▲436
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
Open Agents▲161
OpenAgents - The collaboration OS for AI agents. Contribute to openagents-org/openagents development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · open-agents.dev · its alternatives →
6
Replicas▲239
Hey HN! I'm Connor, creator of Replicas. I'm a heavy Codex/Claude Code user, and I wanted to hand off tasks to agents like I would to an engineer - kick something off before work, let it scaffold while I'm at lunch, even come back to a ready PR. The problem: existing alternatives use workspace VMs that are black boxes. I have no access to any of them - they can't run tests, read logs, or use tools like the Playwright MCP (which I use to verify agents actually fixed what they claim to fix). Replicas gives agents real cloud workspaces where they can: - Run your test suite and read the…
Jun 2026 · replicas.dev · its alternatives →
7
Streamdal – an open-source tail -f for your data▲148
Hey there! This is Dan and Ustin (@uzarubin), and we want to share something cool we've been working on for the past year - an open-source `tail -f` for your data, with a UI. We call it "Streamdal" which is a word salad for streaming systems (because we love them) and DAL or data access layer (because we’re nerds). Here's the repo: https://github.com/streamdal/streamdal Here's the site: https://streamdal.com And here's a live demo: https://demo.streamdal.com (github repo has an explanation of the demo) — — — THE PROBLEM We built this because the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Context Gateway▲220
We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
I wrote an open-source browser alternative for Computer Use for any LLM▲180
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 →
10
Agents.json – OpenAPI Specification for LLMs▲212
Hey HN, we’re building an open specification that lets agents discover and invoke APIs with natural language, built on the OpenAPI standard. agents.json clearly defines the contract between LLMs and API as a standard that's open, observable, and replicable. Here’s a walkthrough of how it works: https://youtu.be/kby2Wdt2Dtk?si=59xGCDy48Zzwr7ND. There’s 2 parts to this: 1. An agents.json file describes how to link API calls together into outcome-based tools for LLMs. This file sits alongside an OpenAPI file. 2. The agents.json SDK loads agents.json files as tools for an LLM that…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
20+ Claude Code agents coordinating on real work (open source)▲53
Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
Index – New Open Source browser agent▲98
Hey HN, Robert from Laminar (lmnr.ai) here. We built Index - new SOTA Open Source browser agent. It reached 92% on WebVoyager with Claude 3.7 (extended thinking). o1 was used as a judge, also we manually double checked the judge. At the core is same old idea - run simple JS script in the browser to identify interactable elements -> draw bounding boxes around them on a screenshot of a browser window -> feed it to the LLM. What made Index so good: 1. We essentially created browser agent observability. We patched Playwright to record the entire browser session while the agent operates,…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
Perplexity Without the Filler▲29
Hey HN, I've been using LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity a lot recently for question answering but had two major qualms: 1. Too much text: I'm already tired of wading through LLM-generated meaningless filler when debugging my code. The last thing I need is more of it when I'm just trying to find a simple answer. 2. The Reddit factor: I've realized that half my search queries have "Reddit" appended to them, especially for experiential questions or recommendations. This led to Just the Answer. Just the Answer uses GPT-4o to generate a unique search query for each message that is…
2024 · justtheanswer.vercel.app · its alternatives →
14
Open-Source Alternative to OpenAI Platform, for Local Models▲93
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 →
15
Offload▲93
Offload your test suite to speed up the agent loop
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Oodle.ai – $10 per million agent traces▲31
Hi HN, we're Kiran and Vijay! Over the past two years, we have built a columnar storage engine for observability: logs, metrics, and traces. Today, it's exciting for us to show what we've built on top of that foundation: LLM Agent Observability. Given how non-deterministic agents are, storing all traces without sampling was critical for us. But these traces tend to be in the MBs, sometimes GBs - we needed to store them inexpensively. We also needed the queries and analyses to be fast. To meet both these goals, we store them in S3 in our own parquet-like file format, and query them using AWS…
Jul 2026 · oodle.ai · its alternatives →
17
I built an open-source answer engine that runs local LLMs▲5
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 →
18
Open-source playground to red-team AI agents with exploits published▲30
We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
Open-source restreaming and live studio▲10
The open source, self-hosted alternative to Restream, StreamYard, and vMix. Self-hosted multistream studio. Ingest from any source -- OBS, hardware encoders, mobile, browser -- over RTMP, SRT, or WebRTC (WHIP coming soon). Switch between inputs live in a browser-based production switcher. Fan-out to every platform at once: YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Facebook, or any custom RTMP/RTMPS endpoint. One stream in, or many. Every destination, simultaneously. No cloud middleman, no per-channel fees, no limits.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
I built an open-source AI data layer that connects any LLM to any datafree▲18
Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
Open-source observability for LLM apps▲10
Hi HN, Hugh and Vince here. LLMonitor helps you record, trace & search your LLM queries and chatbot conversations. You can also capture user feedback on your frontend and correlate it with backend LLM queries then use that to fine-tune your own models. The project started has an internal tool in our previous (failed) AI startup. We’re aware the LLM observability space is very crowded. Apart from being open-source, we differentiate with: - Model-agnostic and minimal lock-in (no MITM of requests). - High focus on DX and dashboard clarity. - Support for complex scenarios: e.g. a chatbot that…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
React.js LLM Agent (open-source)▲8
I've been working in the couple of months on an experiment, trying to make GPT-4 much more useful for web development / React, writing production code that is relevant to any repository without copy pasta from ChatGPT or having small snippets of auto-complete from Copilot that are not in your context. The agent is taking a user story text and generating and composing multiple react components to generate the relevant screens, based on atomic design principles, with Typescript, TailwindCSS and RadixUI. Is is still experimental but very interesting results, I would like to get your…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Local Coding Agent with LLMs to Delegate Tool Calls to Small AI Models▲9
Enables small-to-large self-hosted ai models to use local source code when running tool-calling agentic workloads. We actively data mine 20,900+ (2+ TB) popular github repos using large and small ai models to create reuseable: json, markdown and parquet files for local-first tool-calling models. - d
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Monitoring your OpenAI usage without a third party▲9
LLM observability is an absolute must-have for anyone running something in prod (or prod-like). While all the observability startups are great, you're essentially sending all your OpenAI usage history - prompts, generations, chats - to a random third party. So this script deploys a basic proxy in your Azure account, catches all incoming OpenAI requests, stores logs in your own resource group, and comes with visualizations premade (charts, timelines, chat history, cost estimation, etc). Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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