Open Source Kagi Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Kagi.
The best open source alternative to Kagi is SearXNG. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Kagi alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Kagi is Scira.
Kagi alternatives are mainly Search Engines but may also be AI Interaction & Interfaces. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Kagi.
A self-hostable metasearch engine that queries hundreds of search services on your behalf, tracking and profiling nobody along the way.
SearXNG is a metasearch engine. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Rather than querying a search engine directly and leaving a profile behind, you query an instance, which asks up to 269 different services on your behalf and merges what comes back.
Privacy here is a property of the architecture, not a policy page. Private data is removed from the requests SearXNG forwards to third party services, JavaScript and cookies stay optional instead of required, and the whole thing can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
The project is shaped for people who would rather run their own search.
- Self-hosting: installation through Docker or the project's own install scripts.
- Public instances: around 70 well maintained instances for anyone not running one.
- JSON output: a machine readable format for programmatic use.
- Hardening: an optional rate limiter and bot detection for an instance open to the public.
- Fifty-eight languages: the interface translated by the community.
Setup and fine-tuning are covered by an installation guide and a configuration guide in the project's documentation, and further how-to material sits alongside them. SearXNG began in 2021 as a fork of searx and is developed in the open, with translations handled on a community Weblate and conversation in a Matrix room. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.
An agentic research platform that plans queries, searches live sources and returns cited answers, for anyone who researches on the web.
Scira answers a question by researching it. You type a question, upload a PDF or paste a URL, and the agent breaks the request into sub-tasks, searches live sources, cross-checks the evidence and returns an answer whose claims each carry an inline citation you can click and audit.
The application is built on Next.js with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui, and routes model calls through the Vercel AI SDK, so it runs against xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek and many other providers. Retrieval comes from Exa, Firecrawl, Parallel and Tavily, with Upstash for rate limiting and Drizzle ORM over the database.
Seventeen search modes and twenty-eight tools cover most of what a research session needs.
- Agentic planning: breaks a complex question into steps, picks the models and tools for each, then runs the workflow end to end.
- Grounded retrieval: every answer ships with citations, so the evidence stays auditable rather than implied.
- Specialist modes: academic papers, X posts, Reddit threads, GitHub repositories, stock and crypto data, YouTube transcripts and more.
- Code interpreter: writes and executes Python in a sandboxed Daytona environment and generates charts from the result.
- Lookouts: schedules recurring agents that watch a topic, track changes and email you updates.
Self-hosting runs through Docker Compose or a plain Docker build, and needs API keys for whichever providers you want. The AGPL-3.0 license means bringing your own models and wiring in custom tools is expected rather than tolerated.
