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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Working on open-source perplexity AI

Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…

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. Working on open-source perplexity AI launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Search online with the power of AI. Try now!

    2024 · omniplex.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling? The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity? I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly. It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it…

    Dec 2025 · firstclick.so · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Open-Source Perplexity. Contribute to Omniplex-ai/omniplex development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6CA

    Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…

    2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →

  7. 7HA

    Hey guys, I left my PM job in December to learn how to code. The plan, - Build something that "I" could build with my background (I haven't studied CS) - Something that already existed and I used so I didn't have to spend time finding PMF Over the past 4 months I've been building howsthisgoing.com (a standup bot for slack with AI summaries). My ex-employed signed up in May & I got another customer through a university batchmate sometime in June (the company he's working at). However, since then it's mostly been 0 new customers, I get roughly 6-10 views on my site daily. The bot and my…

    2024 · howsthisgoing.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Be the Answer, Not just a Result

    Jan 2026 · sigmaeo.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…

    2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hey all, During Christmas and new year I was building this app day and night, I basically built it for my own use, I've got so much headache switching between tabs of different LLMs and chatbots, and other ai chat apps were missing some features that I really really wanted: - be able to chat with multiple models at once - be able to do debate with multiple models so thats why I built it, I launched it 2 days ago, 0 users so far, I really appreciate any feedbacks. I offer free plan with 20 message / day in some cheap models (I'm indie dev with no budget) and 2 plans that gives you higher…

    Aug 2026 · omny.chat · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey folks! This is a project that I've been working in my free time for the past few months. It's a news aggregator that uses AI to select relevant articles and summarize them. The default sources are frameworks and libraries' updates, popular HN topics, and languages' subreddits threads that make past a certain threshold. You can run a local instance (needs an OpenAI key) and customize it with your own sources, and adjust the prompt as well. The resulting website can be browsed at https://dev-radar.com/ My next experiment will be with local news. I'm building some feeds with…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I’ve spent the last 2.5 months building a product that runs LLM-powered code reviews on my pull requests — and I just launched it. The tool is built specifically for solo developers. You install it on your repo, trigger a scan by creating a pull request, and it leaves structured review comments using OpenAI under the hood. Funnily enough, I used the dev version of this app to review its own pull requests while building it. It helped me spot bugs, simplify structure, and keep quality high — all with minimal need for another human in the loop. Things I want to try out in the next months : -…

    2025 · codii.dev · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon

    2024 · kopage.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15IB

    Think of HackerNews, but only for AI content. Did build this out of the wish for easier discoverability of new technologies in the AI/ML space. Obviously, so far only a tiny small community, but maybe a few of you find it nice to be around and want to post a link there every now and then :)

    2023 · news.aiapipro.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hey HN, My workflow for any complex queries is to ask it in multiple AI chats (Gemini, Claude, o3,..) in parallel and then continue the conversation with the chat response that I found the most useful. I built a simple open source app that queries 10+ AI models at once and summarizes their answers with a selected combiner AI model. There's a GIF in the github repo that shows it in action. You can try it on your local machine: https://github.com/Nexarithm/multi_model_chat If you are interested, I also made a detailed blog post on technical details, feature of the personal…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey HN, A bit of backstory: I was job hunting for months, applying everywhere and racking up a ton of rejections. It got frustrating, so I decided to flip the script and build something useful instead: an open-source take on Cluely, that popular stealth AI tool from the $15M company. I figured why not recreate something that's already out there and buzzing, but make it free, transparent, and way better for privacy. Plus, it felt like a fun challenge. This is actually my first project ever using Tauri, and I'm hooked. I started out trying Electron, but it just wasn't cutting it for something…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19AA

    Hey folks, I'm Yuval. I run a tiny startup called Glitter AI. It's just me full-time here, with a couple of freelances to help here and there. A couple of months ago, I went from managing zero requests to hundreds -- overnight (won Product of the day on Product Hunt). As someone who gets VERY easily distracted (maybe you relate), I had to find some sort of way of handling all the chaos if I didn't want to burn out. I came up with a pretty cool automation flow that I thought folks on HN here may be interested in reading about :) So here goes: Most of my interactions come through Intercom.…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21CW

    Hey HN friends, Just launched my first NoCode web app, maching.ai, built with Bubble. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

    2023 · maching.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22PG

    Hey everyone, ChatGPT recently added a very small but powerful feature - the ability to share your chats! I think it’s a great way to create prototypes and share them, here are a couple of examples: First, [a small talk simulator](https://chat.openai.com/share/1329d8ec-5141-45f9-a2c2-842d4bad7bcc) a game to help you improve your social skills. Second, [a shark tank simulator](https://chat.openai.com/share/48155efe-101b-4662-b41e-c13aa909f017), see if your idea and pitch can get a deal on ABCs hit show! [Here’s my…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi there, I've created this side project to make it easier to find interesting repositories using AI. There's still a lot of work to be done to improve it, so any suggestions for enhancements would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

    2024 · awesome-repositories.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    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 →

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