AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Reyn – local-first AI that journals and recalls your work
Hey HN, I built Reyn - which I like to describe as "granola but for everything". You're probably thinking another screen capture AI tool (which is true). Same as always, the biggest question that comes up is privacy, so I'll talk about that first 1. raw screen data is never stored in the cloud 2. user controlled filters are granular to the point that you're able to configure specific apps, windows, websites, or even keywords to be discarded immediately (once again never leaving your mac) and never captured down the pipeline I personally built it because I find it useful and always had the…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Give your team one AI memory. Keep your own private.
Jul 2026 · thesecondbrain.dev · its alternatives →
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Mirowl▲96Search all your screenshots via a local OCR-powered AI
Jun 2026 · mirowl.com · its alternatives →
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Friendware▲190Hey HN, I built Friendware because I wanted autocomplete that works everywhere on my Mac, not just in code editors. In any text field it can draft replies, rewrite text, and write prompts for AI tools; it uses on-screen context to adjust based on what you’re doing. My goal was making it feel native and not require workflow changes, so it stays accessible across apps by living in the notch. Currently working on better voice learning and a memory system, would love feedback on what to prioritize!
Jan 2026 · friendware.ai · its alternatives →
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AI Playground▲159Finding notes fast is still hard. You can organize with tags, PARA, or backlinks, but searching always feels slow and frustrating. That’s why I built ConniePad - native app on macOS & iOS. It works offline and lets you capture notes quickly anywhere. It has a comprehensive editor and local speech-to-text on iOS, so you can jot down ideas even without internet. But capturing notes is only half the story. What about finding what you need? ConniePad uses AI search. You can type queries like you would in Google or ChatGPT. It understands similar words, wrong typos, and abbreviations, so you get…
2025 · veed.io · its alternatives →
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I keep running in the same problem of each AI app “remembers” me in its own silo. ChatGPT knows my project details, Cursor forgets them, Claude starts from zero… so I end up re-explaining myself dozens of times a day across these apps. The deeper problem 1. Not portable – context is vendor-locked; nothing travels across tools. 2. Not relational – most memory systems store only the latest fact (“sticky notes”) with no history or provenance. 3. Not yours – your AI memory is sensitive first-party data, yet you have no control over where it lives or how it’s queried. Demo video:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Memno▲104We built Memno. We like to think of Memno as an AI chief of staff. Every photo, document, and voice note you share becomes searchable memory. Ask "What did we decide about Q4?" and it pulls from all your sources. Can also make calls and send texts on your behalf (with approval!) Each user gets their own isolated environment with dedicated vector database, metadata storage, and object storage instances. Some highlights: - Complete data isolation per user (no shared databases), encrypted at rest - Sub-50ms vector search - Document processing pipeline for OCR/transcription/object…
2025 · memno.ai · its alternatives →
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Local▲107Super excited to launch our new app Local today. What we’ve learned at Base Compute over the last months is that running AI directly on your laptop or workstation gives you maximum privacy and it’s free, but it’s also a massive headache to configure. So we’ve decided what matters is making the experience completely frictionless for users. Local analyses the hardware of your laptop, optimises the AI for it, and recommends the best models for your specific device. It let’s you do what you’re doing with cloud AI already, just for free and on your own machine: Chatting with PDF’s, Recording and…
Aug 2026 · basecompute.co · its alternatives →
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AI-powered screen memory — captures, analyzes, and lets you search/chat your screen history. Powered by Gemma 4 . 100% local, 100% private. - ayushh0110/ScreenMind
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Kinic▲69Hey HN, I built Kinic (https://www.kinic.io), a simple but powerful way to create, own, and share your AI Memory. Think of it as “Plaid for AI Memory” or a personal knowledge base for your AI agents that you control. It uses cryptography and WebAuthn with a WASM based vector DB for memory context. Own your own 'AI memory silo' - is one way I talk about it. Right now, most AI tools forget everything when the chat ends or lock your memory in their black boxes (company owned server silo). Also there is some data I would never want to feed to big LLM providers, personal, health related…
2022 · kinic.io · its alternatives →
- 10
Hi HN, I’m Linn, the creator of ToolKuai (https://toolkuai.com). Like many of you, I’ve always been wary of "free" online file converters. Most of them are black boxes: you upload your private documents or images to a remote server, and you have no idea where that data ends up or how it’s being used to train models. I wanted to build a suite of tools (Video/Image compressor, OCR, AI Background Remover) that runs entirely in the browser. No files ever leave your machine. The Tech Stack To make this performant enough to rival server-side processing, I leaned heavily into modern…
Jan 2026 · toolkuai.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hello there HN I experimented with agentic coding recently and I felt the need to track more contextual data by project. Also I felt the need to be able to go beyond the 1D chat to communicate with agents. So I created a local document memory, that is discoverable by agents themselves. The CLI is designed to be easy to pick up by agents. It allows humans to collaborate too by reading / searching / editing documents in the store. I have a Mac native GUI in the review process, I hope it will show up in the App Store soon. You can try it easily, instructions here:…
Jun 2026 · metabrain.eu · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN! I'm the author of mere.run a local first inference runtime built around an installable CLI. I believe that whenever possible we should use the stuff we already own (like our Mac laptops, decent machines gathering dust, our gaming PC) and the limited electrical power we have easy access to, like the socket in the wall next to most of us. We shouldn't have to send our data to the cloud hoping some T&C will prevent it from being used in a way that we'd regret. Most of the local AI solutions are technical, involved, and land a curious body in some package hell. People are optimizing for…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13AZ
I’m not a software engineer by trade, but I needed to make a number of screenshots for my job that all needed to be the exact same size. Every app I found wouldn't let me input or save a preset size to make my life easier, so I thought I'd try out using AI to help me build a simple app to solve that problem. It wasn't long before I started adding more and more useful features and ended up building the screenshot app I wanted to see in the world (CapSize - which now has local OCR and a ton of annotation tools). I had so much fun with it I started thinking of what other apps I could use for…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
- 14
Hello everyone, I doubt this would be relevant to the kind of person who uses HN, but I thought I could share for some feedback. I built this site because there is a whole world of people who believe in new age spirituality and I am very much one of them. It is a site where you get the users gender their goals and their images and use AI and psychology to generate images of them in the process of achieving their goals. I am so deeply struggling with how to get this highly on Google. I don't even know if that is important anymore. What are your suggestions with distribution and getting in…
2025 · visionboardsai.com · its alternatives →
- 15AA
Hey HN, I'm an AI enthusiast and I am launching apps that use ML to solve problems that we all have. I realized that there are a lot of deepfake faces on youtube and social media, so I thought it would be useful (and fun!) to have a tool that can bust those AI faces. So I built DeeFace for 2 reasons: 1. Check if the face you're looking at is real or not 2. For fun! It's something that I from half a year ago would look at and aspire to build someday. I think it's soemthing anyone who's just starting out with ML would appreciate. I hope this tool is fun for you to use as it was for me to…
2024 · deefaces.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com · its alternatives →
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I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
May 2026 · snapname.app · its alternatives →
- 19
Picture Kit▲10I’ve been working on a side project for a while and wanted to share it with the HN community to get feedback. The idea started simple: I wanted to do batch image processing entirely in the browser without uploading anything to a server. Most existing tools were either cloud-based (privacy concerns, slow for large batches) or desktop apps that were hard to automate and combine into workflows. A big source of inspiration was macOS Automator. I really liked how you could chain small actions into repeatable workflows, and I wanted something similar for image processing on the web. At first it…
Jan 2026 · picturekit.app · its alternatives →
- 20
Hey HN, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on: *RAG-Guard*, a document AI that’s all about privacy. It’s an experiment in combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with AI-powered question answering, but with a twist — your data stays yours. Here’s the idea: you can upload contracts, research papers, personal notes, or any other documents, and RAG-Guard processes everything locally in your browser. Nothing leaves your device unless you explicitly approve it. ### How It Works - * Zero-Trust by Design*: Every step happens in your browser until you say otherwise. - * Local…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21IP
Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026 · its alternatives →
- 22IB
I built a tool to roast landing pages with AI agents. I was gathering feedback from watching landing page roast videos, and figured out I could prompt LLMs to analyse a screenshot and roast based on the same criteria. It's not 100% accurate yet, but it has been really insightful when I've tested it on my own websites. Let me know what you think!
2024 · roastmylandingpage.io · its alternatives →
- 23
I have a favour to ask. I’ve been working for a while on Kalavai, a project to make distributed AI easy. There are brilliant tools out there to help AI hobbyists and devs on the software layer (shout out to vLLM and llamacpp amongst many others!) but it’s a jungle out there when it comes to procuring and managing the necessary hardware resources and orchestrating them. This has always led me to compromise on the size of the models I end up using (quantized versions, smaller models) to save cost or to play within the limits of my rig. Today I am happy to share the first public version of our…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, I'm the maker. I built this because I believe the biggest problem with most AI image tools is that they're a "black box." You get what the AI gives you, and if it's 90% right, you're stuck. My goal was to combine AI's speed with a creator's need for control. The core feature is the live editor that gives you the final say on everything. Under the hood, the workflow is designed to give you a better starting point than a simple text-to-image call. Here’s how it works: It first uses the YouTube API to find top-performing thumbnails for your topic. A Gemini model then analyzes those…
2025 · genlayers.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 →