SurfSense

While tools like NotebookLM and Perplexity are impressive and highly effective for conducting research on any topic/query, SurfSense elevates this capability by integrating with your personal knowledge base. It is a highly customizable AI research agent, connected to external sources such as search engines (Tavily, LinkUp), Slack, Linear, Notion, YouTube, GitHub, Discord and more to come.

Video

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/48142909-6391-4084-b7e8-81da388bb1fc

Podcast's

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d516982f-de00-4c41-9e4c-632a7d942f41

Podcast Sample

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bf64a6ca-934b-47ac-9e1b-edac5fe972ec

Key Features

💡 Idea:

Have your own highly customizable private NotebookLM and Perplexity integrated with external sources.

📁 Multiple File Format Uploading Support

Save content from your own personal files (Documents, images, videos and supports 50+ file extensions) to your own personal knowledge base .

🔍 Powerful Search

Quickly research or find anything in your saved content .

💬 Chat with your Saved Content

Interact in Natural Language and get cited answers.

📄 Cited Answers

Get Cited answers just like Perplexity.

🔔 Privacy & Local LLM Support

Works Flawlessly with Ollama local LLMs.

🏠 Self Hostable

Open source and easy to deploy locally.

🎙️ Podcasts

• Blazingly fast podcast generation agent. (Creates a 3-minute podcast in under 20 seconds.)
• Convert your chat conversations into engaging audio content
• Support for multiple TTS providers (OpenAI, Azure, Google Vertex AI)

📊 Advanced RAG Techniques

• Supports 150+ LLM's
• Supports 6000+ Embedding Models.
• Supports all major Rerankers (Pinecode, Cohere, Flashrank etc)
• Uses Hierarchical Indices (2 tiered RAG setup).
• Utilizes Hybrid Search (Semantic + Full Text Search combined with Reciprocal Rank Fusion).
• RAG as a Service API Backend.

ℹ️ External Sources

• Search Engines (Tavily, LinkUp)
• Slack
• Linear
• Notion
• Youtube Videos
• GitHub
• Discord
• and more to come.....

📄 Supported File Extensions

Note

: File format support depends on your ETL service configuration. LlamaCloud supports 50+ formats, while Unstructured supports 34+ core formats.

Documents & Text

LlamaCloud: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .docm, .dot, .dotm, .rtf, .txt, .xml, .epub, .odt, .wpd, .pages, .key, .numbers, .602, .abw, .cgm, .cwk, .hwp, .lwp, .mw, .mcw, .pbd, .sda, .sdd, .sdp, .sdw, .sgl, .sti, .sxi, .sxw, .stw, .sxg, .uof, .uop, .uot, .vor, .wps, .zabw

Unstructured: .doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, .pdf, .xml, .txt, .md, .markdown, .rst, .html, .org, .epub

Presentations

LlamaCloud: .ppt, .pptx, .pptm, .pot, .potm, .potx, .odp, .key

Unstructured: .ppt, .pptx

Spreadsheets & Data

LlamaCloud: .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .xlsb, .xlw, .csv, .tsv, .ods, .fods, .numbers, .dbf, .123, .dif, .sylk, .slk, .prn, .et, .uos1, .uos2, .wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wks, .wq1, .wq2, .wb1, .wb2, .wb3, .qpw, .xlr, .eth

Unstructured: .xls, .xlsx, .csv, .tsv

Images

LlamaCloud: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .svg, .tiff, .webp, .html, .htm, .web

Unstructured: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .tiff, .heic

Audio & Video (Always Supported)

.mp3, .mpga, .m4a, .wav, .mp4, .mpeg, .webm

Email & Communication

Unstructured: .eml, .msg, .p7s

🔖 Cross Browser Extension

• The SurfSense extension can be used to save any webpage you like.
• Its main usecase is to save any webpages protected beyond authentication.

FEATURE REQUESTS AND FUTURE

SurfSense is actively being developed. While it's not yet production-ready, you can help us speed up the process.

Join the SurfSense Discord and help shape the future of SurfSense!

🚀 Roadmap

Stay up to date with our development progress and upcoming features!
Check out our public roadmap and contribute your ideas or feedback:

View the Roadmap: SurfSense Roadmap on GitHub Projects

How to get started?

Installation Options

SurfSense provides two installation methods:

1. Docker Installation - The easiest way to get SurfSense up and running with all dependencies containerized.

   • Includes pgAdmin for database management through a web UI
   • Supports environment variable customization via .env file
   • Flexible deployment options (full stack or core services only)
   • No need to manually edit configuration files between environments
   • See Docker Setup Guide for detailed instructions
   • For deployment scenarios and options, see Deployment Guide

2. Manual Installation (Recommended) - For users who prefer more control over their setup or need to customize their deployment.

Both installation guides include detailed OS-specific instructions for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Before installation, make sure to complete the prerequisite setup steps including:

• PGVector setup
• File Processing ETL Service (choose one):
  • Unstructured.io API key (free tier available, supports 34+ formats)
  • LlamaIndex API key (enhanced parsing, supports 50+ formats)
• Other required API keys

Screenshots

Search Spaces

Manage Documents

Research Agent

Podcast Agent

Agent Chat

Browser Extension

Tech Stack

BackEnd

• FastAPI: Modern, fast web framework for building APIs with Python

• PostgreSQL with pgvector: Database with vector search capabilities for similarity searches

• SQLAlchemy: SQL toolkit and ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) for database interactions

• Alembic: A database migrations tool for SQLAlchemy.

• FastAPI Users: Authentication and user management with JWT and OAuth support

• LangGraph: Framework for developing AI-agents.

• LangChain: Framework for developing AI-powered applications.

• LLM Integration: Integration with LLM models through LiteLLM

• Rerankers: Advanced result ranking for improved search relevance

• Hybrid Search: Combines vector similarity and full-text search for optimal results using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF)

• Vector Embeddings: Document and text embeddings for semantic search

• pgvector: PostgreSQL extension for efficient vector similarity operations

• Chonkie: Advanced document chunking and embedding library

• Uses AutoEmbeddings for flexible embedding model selection

• LateChunker for optimized document chunking based on embedding model's max sequence length

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FrontEnd

• Next.js 15.2.3: React framework featuring App Router, server components, automatic code-splitting, and optimized rendering.

• React 19.0.0: JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

• TypeScript: Static type-checking for JavaScript, enhancing code quality and developer experience.

• Vercel AI SDK Kit UI Stream Protocol: To create scalable chat UI.

• Tailwind CSS 4.x: Utility-first CSS framework for building custom UI designs.

• Shadcn: Headless components library.

• Lucide React: Icon set implemented as React components.

• Framer Motion: Animation library for React.

• Sonner: Toast notification library.

• Geist: Font family from Vercel.

• React Hook Form: Form state management and validation.

• Zod: TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference.

• @hookform/resolvers: Resolvers for using validation libraries with React Hook Form.

• @tanstack/react-table: Headless UI for building powerful tables & datagrids.

DevOps

• Docker: Container platform for consistent deployment across environments

• Docker Compose: Tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications

• pgAdmin: Web-based PostgreSQL administration tool included in Docker setup

Extension

Manifest v3 on Plasmo

Future Work

• Add More Connectors.
• Patch minor bugs.
• Document Chat [REIMPLEMENT]
• Document Podcasts

Contribute

Contributions are very welcome! A contribution can be as small as a ⭐ or even finding and creating issues. Fine-tuning the Backend is always desired.

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