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Open source

Open-Source AI Apps You Can Actually Use — or Build On

Hand-picked open-source AI projects you can run yourself for everyday work — or use as a base to build your own app. Not the giant developer frameworks; those live on the open-source leaderboard. Each is labeled ready-to-use or build-on, with setup difficulty, live GitHub stars, and license.

Ready to use

Works as an app out of the box — minimal or no coding.

Jan

Run open-source AI chatbots offline on your own computer.

No-code
AnythingLLM

Chat privately with your own documents using any AI model.

No-code
LibreChat

One self-hosted chat app for many AI providers.

Some setup
Open WebUI

A polished self-hosted ChatGPT-style interface for any model.

Some setupSource-available license
Immich

Self-hosted photo library with AI search and face recognition.

Some setup
Paperless-ngx

Scan, OCR, and search all your documents.

Some setup
ComfyUI

Node-based local image and video generation.

Some setup
Fooocus

Dead-simple local image generation from a prompt.

Some setup
Khoj

A self-hosted AI second brain for your notes and docs.

Some setup
Chatbox

One clean desktop app for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and local models.

No-code
Perplexica

A self-hosted AI answer engine that searches the web with citations.

Some setup
Stirling-PDF

A private, self-hosted toolbox for everything PDF.

Some setupOpen-core license
Upscayl

Enlarge and sharpen images with AI, offline and free.

No-code
InvokeAI

A professional local studio for AI image generation.

Some setup
Buzz

Transcribe and caption audio offline on your computer.

No-code
Hyprnote

A local-first AI notetaker for your meetings.

No-code
Activepieces

Open-source, AI-native automation platform you can self-host or run in the cloud

Some setupOpen-core license
AppFlowy

An open-source Notion alternative you can self-host.

No-code
SiYuan

A privacy-first note and knowledge app with built-in AI.

No-code
Trilium

Build a self-hosted second brain and personal wiki.

Some setup
Inbox Zero

An AI email assistant that cleans up your inbox.

Some setup
LibreTranslate

A free, self-hostable translation API.

Some setup
Kotaemon

A self-hosted chat-with-your-documents app with citations.

Some setup
OpenUI

Describe a UI in plain language and see it built, live.

Some setup
bolt.diy

Build and deploy full-stack web apps with any LLM.

Some setup
Onlook

Visually build and edit a real React app with AI.

Some setup

Build on it

A base you build your own app or workflow on.

LocalAI

A self-hosted, OpenAI-compatible API you fully control.

Developer
whisper.cpp

Fast offline speech-to-text on your own machine.

Developer
Docling

Turn PDFs and Office files into clean, AI-ready text.

Developer
Onyx

AI search and chat across your company apps.

Developer★ 32kOtherPython
PrivateGPT

Ask questions about your documents, fully offline.

Developer
Lobe Chat

A slick multi-provider AI chat UI you can self-host.

Some setupSource-available license
faster-whisper

Fast local speech-to-text for your own apps.

Developer
Piper

A fast, fully local text-to-speech engine.

Developer
F5-TTS

Clone a voice from a short sample and generate speech.

Developer
Qdrant

High-performance open-source vector search engine

Some setup★ 35kApache-2.0Rust
txtai

An all-in-one embeddings database for search and RAG.

Developer
CrewAI

CrewAI is an open-source framework for orchestrating multi-agent AI workflows, offering both a visual no-code editor and CLI for developers

Developer
Letta

Stateful AI agents with long-term memory (formerly MemGPT).

Developer★ 24kApache-2.0
Marker

Convert PDFs and documents to clean Markdown.

DeveloperRestricted model weights
Crawl4AI

Open-source LLM-friendly web crawler that outputs clean Markdown and JSON

Developer
Label Studio

The most popular open-source data labeling platform for text, image, audio, and more

Some setup
llamafile

Run a local LLM from a single file, no install.

Some setup
LLaMA-Factory

Fine-tune open LLMs with no code.

Developer
Windmill

Turn scripts into workflows, APIs, and internal tools.

Developer
KoboldCpp

Run open LLMs locally with a simple interface.

Some setup
smolagents

A barebones open-source library for agents that think in code

Developer
Pydantic AI

Type-safe Python agent framework from the team behind Pydantic

Developer

How we pick these

Every project here is hand-reviewed for real usefulness, not just star count. We favor tools you can run yourself and either use day-to-day or build on. GitHub stars, license, and last-commit refresh weekly so you can see what's actively maintained. A couple of entries use source-available (not strictly open-source) licenses — we label those honestly so you know the terms before you build on them.