SurfSense

What it does

SurfSense is an open source, air-gapped research notebook that runs on your own machine. The site offers a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, with installers listed for Windows (exe), macOS Apple Silicon (dmg) and Linux (deb, AppImage). You can use a local model such as Qwen or Gemma, or connect a hosted key for OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible provider. Indexed sources can be turned into slides, reports, briefings, podcasts, quizzes, flashcards, mind maps and other export formats. No account is required, and the index is stored in your user folder. Plugins add live data from platforms such as Google Search, YouTube, TikTok, Google Maps, Amazon, Walmart and Indeed. Documentation for SurfSense 2.0 is still being written.

The home page says SurfSense runs entirely on your machine, keeps the index on disk, and can keep answering questions from already added sources with the network cable pulled when a local model is used. It compares itself with NotebookLM and Open Notebook on offline use, account requirement, setup method, model choice and source code. The download page asks for an email address before showing platform download links and points to GitHub for older versions, checksums and release notes. A plugin registry is described, with eight plugins shipping at the time of the page, and plugins are listed as open to pull requests. The SurfSense 2.0 docs page is present but states the documentation is still being written. Pricing, docs, contact, privacy and terms pages are linked in the footer.