Vane

A private, self-hosted AI answering engine, formerly Perplexica, that searches the web through SearxNG and answers with cited sources.

37.9k stars, 4.2k forks TypeScript On GitHub since April 2024

View on GitHub How to run it
Development has slowed down. 1 commit in the last 90 days; the latest on 1 September 2026. Active alternatives: AnythingLLM, DocsGPT, RAGFlow.

What is Vane?

Vane is an open alternative to Perplexity. It sends your question to a bundled SearxNG metasearch instance, reads the results and has a language model write an answer with links to its sources. You can choose speed, balanced or quality modes, limit the search to discussions or academic papers, and run it with local models through Ollama or with OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and Groq. It was previously called Perplexica.

Good fit if

  • You want Perplexity-style answers without sending your searches to a commercial service.
  • You already run Ollama and want web-grounded answers from local models.

Look elsewhere if

Before you adopt it

Vane is MIT-licensed. It runs as a single Docker container with SearxNG included. It is one developer's project, and activity has slowed sharply.

Drafted with AI from the project's README and repository data, then checked against that data on 30 October 2026. Report a correction

Vane health: is it still maintained?

19 of 100, slowing down

  • Activity
    1 commit in the last 90 days, the latest on 1 September 2026.
    4 / 30
  • Contributors
    1 person wrote the 1 commit of the last 90 days; the most active wrote 100% of them.
    2 / 20
  • Releases
    3 releases in the last 12 months; the latest, v1.12.2, on 10 April 2026.
    8 / 20
  • Replies to issues
    Maintainers answered 0% of recent issues.
    0 / 20
  • Security practices
    No OpenSSF Scorecard for this repository yet, so this part gets a neutral score.
    5 / 10

Read from GitHub on 1 November 2026. How the score works

Vane license: is it open source?

Vane uses MIT, an open-source license approved by the OSI.

  1. April 2024First published on GitHub.
  2. TodayMIT.

How to run Vane yourself

Docker
Dockerfile or compose file in the repository
Compose file
docker-compose.yaml: 1 service
Setup effort
1 of 5, judged from the compose file
Kubernetes
No Helm chart in the repository
Desktop and mobile
No app builds in GitHub releases
Interface languages
English only

Install instructions: the README on GitHub.

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Questions about Vane

Is Vane open source?

Yes. Vane is published under MIT, an OSI-approved open-source license.

Is Vane still maintained?

Its health score is 19 of 100 (slowing down). It had 1 commit in the last 90 days, the latest on 1 September 2026, and its latest release came out on 10 April 2026.

How do I run Vane?

You can run it with Docker. The README on GitHub has the exact steps.

What are the alternatives to Vane?

Close alternatives in the AI chat & local LLMs category include AnythingLLM, DocsGPT, RAGFlow.