I’ve been using NotebookLM for about a year now, and I’m still going strong. It’s my go-to for making sense of long stacks of documents and genuinely helps with learning and understanding new things. The only problem with NotebookLM is that it’s still a cloud product, and if you’re someone who prefers open-source or hosting tools on your own servers, there aren’t many decent replacements beyond a local LLM setup, and even those can either feel either lackluster or too technical to bother with.
Enter Khoj, the first open-source tool I’ve found that closely matches NotebookLM’s functionality. It feels like a real alternative that actually gives you NotebookLM-style retrieval, and it also offers extras that NotebookLM doesn't have. Here’s why Khoj is a great open-source NotebookLM alternative…
What exactly is Khoj?
An open-source solution to NotebookLM
Khoj is an open-source, self-hostable personal AI assistant that works with your notes and documents so you can search them and talk to them like a knowledge base. It’s pretty similar to most of the AI-assisted second-brain types of tools I’ve tried before. Instead of acting like a typical chatbot, it’s designed to understand and retrieve information from your own files first, then combines that with AI responses and web search when needed.
It works similar to NotebookLM by indexing your data and converting it into semantic embeddings, which lets it match questions with relevant parts of your notes even if you don’t use the exact keywords. This is what makes its natural language search across large note collections possible.
The platform is built to be modular, so you can run it either locally or in the cloud, and plug in your own AI models - the hosted version primarily uses GPT-4.o. It connects to multiple data sources like Markdown files, PDFs, plain text files, GitHub repositories, web content (including YouTube videos), and even note apps like Obsidian and Notion.
In practice, Khoj works as a mix between an AI search engine, a research assistant, and a conversational interface for your notes. It’s especially useful for people who keep a lot of information in text files, personal knowledge systems, or document folders and want a smarter way to interact with the material without relying entirely on cloud tools. The real appeal is flexibility; you can treat it as an AI layer over your existing setup, or as an all-in-one tool that you fully migrate into.
Things Khoj does better than NotebookLM
It outperforms NotebookLM in some areas
Khoj and NotebookLM serve the same purpose - to help you make sense of information. But right out of the gate, Khoj looks and feels very different. For starters, the layout is much more manageable and approachable. While it doesn’t have notebooks or nested folders, Khoj does list all of your chats in the left-side panel, which makes them easier to access in workflows that span multiple subjects. This beats having to navigate back and forth between your NotebookLM notebooks. It also has a global search function for you to access your uploaded files instantly.
Khoj is source grounded and implements a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) approach when you’re working with files and weblinks, but it can also access web data in real-time. I know NotebookLM has had web search for a while now, but it requires an intentional interaction, whereas Khoj simply uses web search by default when your own knowledge base is sparse. And it cites all of its sources too, which you can visit directly.
Moreover, Khoj has Agents and Automations available to use completely free. Agents are similar to the custom personas you’d create through NotebookLM’s Custom Mode. These personas come with instruction presets and the best model selected for the job. Automations are also a great addition in Khoj that you won’t find in NotebookLM’s free tier. You can set it up for scheduling recurring queries or sending you daily news summaries.
Khoj isn’t a complete match for NotebookLM
It’s not quite there yet
NotebookLM still comes out on top for retrieval and prompt accuracy because it’s built for document understanding with Google’s advanced RAG architecture. Kohj’s responses feel like they drag a little and don’t give me exactly what I’m looking for, so it does require me to re-prompt it a couple more times to get to where I want. For prompting, NotebookLM provides more structured and consistent outputs, while Khoj focuses on a more dynamic workflow with outside information.
Khoj does support extras like mind maps through integration with Mermaid, but it doesn’t have the extensive Studio suite NotebookLM does with quizzes, slide decks, flashcards, and so on.
Open-source AI for your notes
After spending some time with Khoj, I could see it legitimately replacing NotebookLM. Moreover, it has some extras NotebookLM doesn’t, such as custom agents and automations for all free users, default web search, and a more privacy-focused philosophy. It’s not a complete one-to-one match for NotebookLM in every scenario, but for those who prefer open-source and local control, Khoj makes a strong case for becoming the center of your note-based workflow.