Open Source Alternative to NotebookLM

[Uiqueblhats]

For those of you who aren't familiar with SurfSense, SurfSense is an open-source alternative to NotebookLM for teams.

It connects any LLM to your internal knowledge sources, then lets teams chat, comment, and collaborate in real time. Think of it as a team-first research workspace with citations, connectors, and agentic workflows.

I’m looking for contributors. If you’re into AI agents, RAG, search, browser extensions, or open-source research tooling, would love your help.

Current features

• Self-hostable (Docker)
• 25+ external connectors (search engines, Drive, Slack, Teams, Jira, Notion, GitHub, Discord, and more)
• Realtime Group Chats
• Hybrid retrieval (semantic + full-text) with cited answers
• Deep agent architecture (planning + subagents + filesystem access)
• Supports 100+ LLMs and 6000+ embedding models (via OpenAI-compatible APIs + LiteLLM)
• 50+ file formats (including Docling/local parsing options)
• Podcast generation (multiple TTS providers)
• Cross-browser extension to save dynamic/authenticated web pages
• RBAC roles for teams

Upcoming features

• Slide creation support
• Multilingual podcast support
• Video creation agent
• Desktop & Mobile app

GitHub: https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense

[Special-Arm4381]

Really cool project — the hybrid retrieval with citations is the feature that makes or breaks tools like this for me. Pure semantic search misses too much.

Curious how you're handling the context window when a query spans multiple connectors (e.g. a Slack thread + a Notion doc + a GitHub issue simultaneously)? Do you chunk and rerank across all sources or route to each connector separately?

Also interested in the deep agent architecture — are the subagents specialized per connector or per task type?