<ahref="https://www.surfsense.com/"><imgwidth="1584"height="396"alt="SurfSense, the open-source NotebookLM alternative for open web research"src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9361ef58-1753-4b6e-b275-5020d8847261"/></a>
SurfSense is the **open-source NotebookLM alternative for AI agents**, an open web research platform with live data connectors. Your agents research the live web with structured data from **Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, and any page on the open web**, through one **REST API** or **MCP server**. Scheduled and event-triggered agents turn what they find into briefs and alerts, and a built-in knowledge base keeps every finding searchable with citations.
> For the past couple of months we built SurfSense as the best general research agent for your own knowledge, and that chapter earned us a community we are genuinely proud of. Agentic tools like Claude, OpenCode, Hermes, and OpenClaw have now proven that agents are the future, and reasoning over a static index is becoming something every capable agent does out of the box. What agents still lack is **live data from the places where answers actually live, and the workflows around it**. That is where we are pointing all of our energy: giving agents the primitives to research the open web.
> **Nothing you rely on is going away.** Your knowledge base, chat with citations, reports, podcasts, presentations, automations, and collaborative chats all keep working, and self-hosting stays free and open source. Read the full announcement on [our changelog](https://www.surfsense.com/changelog).
Ask any capable agent "what is Reddit saying about this product since launch?" or "what do the reviews of these ten places actually complain about?" and it has nowhere trustworthy to look. Official platform APIs are rate-limited, priced for enterprises, or missing entirely; scraping plumbing is brittle; and driving a browser with an LLM burns minutes and tokens per page. SurfSense gives agents the primitives instead:
- **One typed surface for wherever the data lives.** Every connector is a REST endpoint returning structured JSON — posts, comments, transcripts, reviews, SERPs, pages. No rate-limit roulette, no HTML parsing, no browser loop.
- **An MCP server** that exposes every connector as a native tool (`surfsense_reddit_scrape`, `surfsense_google_search`, and more) to Claude, Cursor, or any agent framework.
- **An agent harness**, not just raw data: retries, structured output, and credit metering are built in, so agents go from a question to a cited brief without you building the plumbing.
- **Open source and self-hostable**, so your research stays on your own infrastructure.
| **Reddit** | Posts, comments, and subreddit streams without the official API's rate limits | [Reddit Scraper API](https://www.surfsense.com/reddit) |
| **External MCP Connectors** | Bring any MCP server to your agents, with one-click OAuth for Notion, Slack, Jira, and more | [External MCP Connectors](https://www.surfsense.com/external-mcp-connectors) |
Billing is pay as you go: connectors bill per item actually returned, crawls per page successfully fetched, and failed calls are never billed. Self-hosted installs run with billing off. See [pricing](https://www.surfsense.com/pricing).
Your agent can now call every connector as a native tool. See the [SurfSense MCP server](https://www.surfsense.com/mcp-server) page for the full tool list, or run the server locally from [`surfsense_mcp`](./surfsense_mcp).
Go to [surfsense.com](https://www.surfsense.com), log in, and ask the agent for live web data in plain English. New accounts start with $5 of free credit and no subscription.
Run the entire platform, connectors, agents, automations, and the MCP server on your own infrastructure. Self-hosted installs ship with billing off, so scraping, crawling, and agent runs are limited only by your hardware and the model keys you bring.
The install script sets up [Watchtower](https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower) automatically for daily auto-updates. To skip it, add the `--no-watchtower` flag. For Docker Compose, manual installation, and other deployment options, see the [docs](https://www.surfsense.com/docs/).
The research workspace that made SurfSense the leading open-source NotebookLM alternative is still here, and everything your agents gather lands in it.
- Run full agent turns on a schedule or in response to events, described in plain English, with results written back to Notion, Slack, Linear, and Jira.
Native AI assistance in every application on your computer. Download from the [latest release](https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense/releases/latest).
SurfSense is the only open-source product that combines a NotebookLM-style research workspace for people with live-data primitives for agents. Here is how that stacks up against each class of tool.
**vs browser agents (Browserbase, Browser Use).** Browser agents drive a real browser with an LLM in the loop — the right tool when a task needs clicking, logging in, or filling forms. But most research is read-only retrieval, and for retrieval the LLM-in-a-browser loop costs you minutes and thousands of tokens per page. A SurfSense connector call is one HTTP request: seconds, deterministic, and zero tokens spent deciding where to click.
**vs scraping APIs (Firecrawl).** Scraping APIs are great at turning a generic page into markdown, but a markdown blob still leaves your agent parsing structure out of prose, and they degrade on bot-protected platforms like Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram. SurfSense connectors return platform-native structured items — posts, comments, transcripts, reviews — and bill only for items actually returned; failed calls are never billed.
**vs search APIs (Exa, Tavily, Parallel).** Search APIs answer from a web index, which is the right tool for "find me pages about X." They cannot pull a Reddit thread's comments, TikTok reactions, YouTube transcripts, or Google Maps reviews — the places where the answer often actually lives.
**vs scraper marketplaces (Apify).** Marketplaces give you thousands of community actors, each with its own schema, quality, and pricing. SurfSense is one typed API and one MCP server with an agent harness and a research workspace behind it, and it is open source.
| **Live web data for agents** | No | Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, and web crawl connectors via REST API and MCP |
| **Agentic Architecture** | No | Yes, powered by [LangChain Deep Agents](https://docs.langchain.com/oss/python/deepagents/overview) with planning, subagents, and file system access |
| **AI Automations & Agents** | No | Scheduled workflows, event triggers, and chat-built no-code automations with write-back to Notion, Slack, Linear & Jira |
| **Podcast Generation** | Audio Overviews with customizable hosts and languages | Available with multiple TTS providers (NotebookLM is better here, actively improving) |
