Khoj

Khoj is an open-source personal AI application built by Khoj AI, a small applied artificial intelligence company. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) and available both as a self-hosted installation and as a managed cloud app at app.khoj.dev. The project describes itself as "your AI second brain" and scales from a private on-device assistant to a cloud-scale deployment.

What It Is

Khoj is a personal AI assistant that connects to any local or online large language model — including llama3, qwen, gemma, mistral, GPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek — and lets users query both the web and their own documents in a single interface. It sits in the category of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools combined with agent and automation capabilities, making it more than a simple chat wrapper. Users can run it entirely on their own hardware for full privacy, or use the hosted cloud version without any setup.

Core Capabilities

The README lists a broad feature set:

• Multi-model chat: connect to local LLMs via llama.cpp or remote APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.)
• Document search: semantic search across PDFs, Markdown, Notion, Word docs, org-mode files, and images
• Custom agents: create agents with custom knowledge bases, personas, chat models, and tools
• Automations: schedule recurring research tasks and receive personal newsletters or smart notifications by email
• Image generation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text built in
• Multi-surface access: browser, Obsidian plugin, Emacs, desktop app, phone, and WhatsApp

Deployment Model

Khoj is explicitly designed to be self-hostable. The project states "Khoj is open-source, self-hostable. Always." Users can follow the self-hosting docs to run it on their own computer or server. For organizations, Khoj is also available as a cloud service, on-premises deployment, or hybrid solution under an enterprise offering. The managed cloud app at app.khoj.dev requires no setup and is free to start.

Open-Source Lineage and Repository Activity

The repository on GitHub was created in August 2021 and has accumulated over 35,000 stars and more than 2,200 forks as of mid-2026, according to the GitHub project page. The project is written primarily in Python and is actively maintained, with the latest release tagged as 2.0.0-beta.28 published in March 2026. The GitHub topics include agent, rag, semantic-search, self-hosted, obsidian-md, whatsapp-ai, and llama3, reflecting the breadth of its integrations.

Update: Version 2.0.0-beta.28 and Pipali Launch

The most recent GitHub release is 2.0.0-beta.28, published March 26, 2026, indicating the project is in active beta development toward a 2.0 milestone. Alongside Khoj, the team has launched Pipali (also open-source), described as an AI co-worker that runs locally on your computer and handles research, creation, and automation tasks. The README also references a blog post on Khoj's performance on modern retrieval and reasoning benchmarks as a recent signal of the project's research direction.