KhojOpen-source personal AI assistant that searches and chats with your documents, notes, and the web.

4.6 (5)

Reviewed by Daniel Nikulshyn·Updated May 2026

Open Source Personal AI Self-Hosted Semantic Search Knowledge Management Privacy-First Chatbot

Overview

Khoj is an open-source personal AI assistant designed to help you find, organize, and interact with your own knowledge base. It connects to local files, notes, PDFs, and online sources, letting you query them through natural language chat or semantic search. The tool can run locally for privacy or be used via a hosted version, and supports multiple LLM backends including open-source and commercial models. Beyond search, Khoj can summarize documents, generate images, browse the web, and act as a long-term conversational companion that remembers context across sessions. It is geared toward researchers, writers, developers, and knowledge workers who want a customizable AI layer over their personal data without sending everything to a third-party service.

Key features

Semantic search across local documents
Conversational chat with memory
Integrations with Obsidian, Emacs, and Notion
Web search and image generation
Local or cloud deployment options
Support for PDFs, Markdown, and plain text

Pricing

Model: Freemium
Category: AI Agents
Rating: 4.6 / 5 (5)

Use cases

Chat with personal notes and PDFs

Query your local Markdown notes, PDFs, and text files in natural language to quickly retrieve information without manually searching through folders.

Augment Obsidian or Emacs workflows

Integrate Khoj into Obsidian, Emacs, or Notion to add semantic search and AI chat directly on top of your existing knowledge base.

Private self-hosted research assistant

Run Khoj locally with your preferred open-source LLM to summarize documents and explore ideas while keeping sensitive data on your own machine.

Long-term conversational companion

Use Khoj as a memory-enabled assistant that recalls prior chats and combines web search with personal context for ongoing projects.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Open-source and self-hostable
Works with personal files and notes
Supports multiple LLM providers
Combines chat, search, and web browsing

Cons

Self-hosting requires technical setup
Quality depends on chosen LLM
Smaller ecosystem than mainstream assistants

Reviews

4.6

Average from 5 ratings.

Diego Fernández

Mar 27, 2026

Skeptical, then convinced

I went in skeptical — most tools in this space overpromise. It actually delivers on support for PDFs, Markdown, and plain text, and works with personal files and notes caught me off guard. Quality depends on chosen LLM is why this isn't a perfect score, still, I'd recommend giving it a real trial.

Esther Adeyemi

Mar 1, 2026

Compared a few options

Evaluated this against two competitors. Where it wins: conversational chat with memory and works with personal files and notes. On balance the feature set — especially local or cloud deployment options — justifies the 5 stars for our use case.

Aaliyah Johnson

Dec 1, 2025

Solid for our team

We rolled this out across the team last quarter and supports multiple LLM providers. Conversational chat with memory fits neatly into how we already work, and semantic search across local documents removed a step we used to do by hand. Quality depends on chosen LLM, which is the main caveat, but it has held up under daily use.

Sanjay Gupta

Nov 14, 2025

Compared a few options

Evaluated this against two competitors. Where it wins: local or cloud deployment options and combines chat, search, and web browsing. Where it lags: quality depends on chosen LLM. On balance the feature set — especially conversational chat with memory — justifies the 4 stars for our use case.

Grace Okafor

Jun 15, 2025

Does the job

Pretty happy overall. Integrations with Obsidian, Emacs, and Notion just works and combines chat, search, and web browsing. Quality depends on chosen LLM can be annoying, but no dealbreakers — I'd recommend it to a friend without hesitating.