🌊SurfSense
MODSetter/SurfSense · homepage ↗
Open-source NotebookLM alternative. Research the open web with live data(Reddit, YT, IG, TikTok, Indeed, Google Search, Maps etc) through one platform, API or MCP server. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/ejRNvftDp9
⭐ Very popular: 16k stars, gaining about 97 a week
View on GitHub ↗repo profile
momentum
durability
bus factor = how many people it takes to cover more than half the commits (6 months). 1 is a solo project; higher means the work is spread across a team. top-author share is the single busiest author's slice of those commits.
since we covered it
why it's a big deal
- Positions itself as a NotebookLM alternative for teams that removes the source, notebook, and file-size limits of the hosted product, targeting groups that want to keep research data self-hosted.
- Serves teams rather than individuals, adding real-time multiplayer chat, role-based access control across Owner, Admin, Editor, and Viewer, and comment threads with mentions.
- Pulls from over 27 external sources including Slack, Notion, Jira, Linear, GitHub, and the major cloud drives, and can write results back to several of them, so it sits on top of existing team tooling rather than replacing it.
under the hood
- Splits into a Python FastAPI backend and a Next.js TypeScript frontend, with the repo roughly 65 percent Python and 31 percent TypeScript.
- Runs an agentic pipeline built on LangChain Deep Agents and answers queries with hybrid search that combines semantic and full-text retrieval, generating cited reports in formats including PDF, DOCX, HTML, LaTeX, EPUB, and ODT.
- Stays model-agnostic through the OpenAI spec and LiteLLM for over 100 LLMs plus local options via vLLM and Ollama, and self-hosts through a Docker one-liner or Docker Compose under Apache-2.0.
Radar summary, generated from the project's public sources
star history
- PR#8 4k 2025-05-14
- now 16k + 12k since first covered
curve is sampled from GitHub's star history, plus our own daily readings since we covered it; the dashed stretch is before we first covered it, the solid line since. figures at coverage are the numbers we printed then (approx.), current count is live.
understory
Deep in the understory, shipping hard, still flying under the radar.
- output, commits & releases
- clout, star velocity
output = commits & releases; clout = star velocity, both 0 to 100 monthly indices; the gap where output runs above clout is the understory. The understory →
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Personal Knowledge-First AI Research Agent
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