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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Surf – open-source Web Access for LLMs

SURF (Search Utility & Reading Framework) is an open-source API that bridges LLMs with the web. It provides a standardized interface for web search and content processing that preserves formatting of tables, code, and complex layouts. Key features: - Multiple search providers (SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, Brave) - HTML cleaning and smart content extraction - Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for Claude and other AI assistants - Self-deployable with minimal setup (Docker, bare metal, cloud) - API key authentication I built this to make it easier to add web capabilities to LLM applications…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1
    Surf▲203

    Get rewarded for your everyday browsing

    2021 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Get search volumes & keyword data directly in Google.

    2020 · surferseo.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Deta Surf▲340

    Hi HN! We got frustrated with the fragmented experience of exploring & creating across our file manager, the web and document apps. Lots of manual searching, opening windows & tabs, scrolling, and ultimately copying & pasting into a document editor. Surf is a desktop app meant for simultaneous research and thinking to minimize the grunt work. It’s made of two parts: 1) A multi-media library where you can save and organize files and webpages into collections called Notebooks. 2) A LLM-powered smart document which you can auto-generate using the context from any stored page, tab or entire…

    2024 · deta.surf · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Surf▲447

    AI-powered crypto insights and trading in one platform

    2025 · asksurf.ai · 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

    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 →

  7. 7DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Surfer▲67

    Open-source digital footprint exporter

    2024 · surfsup.web.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    API to connect your LLM to the internet

    2023 · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Surfly▲183

    Simple, Fast, and Secure Co-browsing

    2017 · surfly.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Open-source LLM tracing for agent visibility

    Mar 2026 · breadcrumb.sh · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Lumos is an LLM co-pilot for browsing the web, powered by local LLMs (Ollama). - Summarize long threads on issue tracking sites, forums, and social media sites - Summarize news articles - Ask questions about reviews on business and product pages - Ask questions about long, technical documentation - What else?

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    SurfPal▲144

    Track, analyze & limit your time spent on each website

    2024 · surfpal.mutacore.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    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 →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, I’m pleased to release my “surf engine” to the public for you to try. This is might be for you if you’ve grown frustrated with commercialised SERPs, and want to find the other websites are (still) out there. Kudos to Marginalia Search for showing that it’s possible to build a search engine as a hobbyist: https://search.marginalia.nu/ Feedback of all kinds very welcome! Ali

    2022 · highbrow.se · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Effortless LLM extraction from documents

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    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 →

  19. 19

    AI chat & Instagram templates

    2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    Surfly▲80

    Surf the web together. From anywhere.

    2014 · surfly.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    Surf▲58

    A forum for everything on Google

    2021 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    AI sidebar companions for cross-app workflows and automation

    May 2026 · surfbuddy.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    Swell▲75

    To do list & task manager as a Chrome extension

    2019 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24AT

    I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…

    2025 · llmapitest.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 →