Vane
Vane is a self-hosted AI answering engine that searches the web and gives cited answers for people who want private searches.
What it is good for
- Getting cited answers to questions from web search
- Searching the web without tying results to your identity
- Asking questions about uploaded PDFs and documents
- Running AI search on your own hardware with local models
At a glance
- Who it is for
- Setup
- Guided command-line setup
Level 4 of 5. You copy and paste commands into a terminal by following the instructions. Comfortable territory for vibe coders.
- Cost
- Free and open source
- Type
- Agent app
- Tasks
- Works with
- Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Groq, SearxNG
Momentum
- Rank this week
- Not ranked yet
- Best rank
- None yet
- GitHub stars
- 37,962
GitHub numbers as of Nov 2, 2026. Updated weekly.
Official links
Setup steps are on the official pages. We do not repeat them here, since they change.
Questions
- Is Vane free?
- Yes. It is free and open source (MIT license).
- Do I need to know how to code to use Vane?
- You do not need to write code, but setup means copying and pasting commands into a terminal by following its instructions.
- What does Vane work with?
- According to its own documentation, it works with Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Groq, and SearxNG.
- What is Vane good for?
- Getting cited answers to questions from web search, searching the web without tying results to your identity, asking questions about uploaded PDFs and documents, and running AI search on your own hardware with local models.
Similar agents
- Agent-Me
Agent-Me is a self-hosted framework that builds an inspectable AI twin of you from your own notes and decisions, for people who want an AI that answers from their own records.
- DeepTutor
DeepTutor is a self-hosted AI tutor that turns your own documents and notes into personalized lessons for learners.
- Cherry Studio
Cherry Studio is a desktop app that chats with multiple AI models and runs agents for everyday work on your computer.
- GPT Researcher
GPT Researcher is an agent that runs deep web and local document research and writes cited reports for people who need factual summaries.
- AutoResearchClaw
AutoResearchClaw is an agent app that turns a research idea into a full academic paper with citations and experiments, for researchers and students.
- Local Deep Research
Local Deep Research is an agent app that runs multi-step research across the web, academic papers, and your own documents for people who want privacy and control.