Vane
Self-hosted AI-powered search engine, an open-source Perplexity alternative
Overview
Vane is an AI-powered search engine that combines web search with LLM synthesis to produce cited, conversational answers similar to Perplexity AI. It runs as a Docker container and supports multiple search backends and LLM providers. Users can ask follow-up questions and receive source-grounded responses with inline citations.
Where it falls short of ChatGPT
- No user account system or conversation persistence across sessions
- Image and video search capabilities are absent
- Answer quality is heavily dependent on the LLM and search API keys you supply
- No mobile app or browser extension for quick lookups
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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