SurfSense is an air-gapped, privacy-focused, open-source alternative to Google NotebookLM. It is a desktop AI agent that researches, transforms and edits your documents entirely on your own machine, so sources you cannot upload anywhere, contracts, research, internal files, never leave your disk. It has the familiar NotebookLM-style workflow of asking questions across a set of sources, backed by live web research through platform connectors when you want it. SurfSense has more than 16,000 stars on GitHub and is under active development in 2026.
SurfSense keeps your index on your disk and can run with no egress at all, which is the core difference from cloud notebook tools that require uploading sources to a provider’s servers. On top of local document research, a plugin system adds connectors for the live web, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Google Search and Maps, Amazon and more, and it can also act as an MCP server for other AI tools. Enterprise deployments mirror licensing and plugin endpoints inside your own network with central model and network policy, so teams can adopt it under strict compliance rules while individuals just download and run the app.
The SurfSense app is free forever, with no account, trial clock or usage cap, and self-building from the open-source code is free too. A paid licence unlocks SurfSense’s own scraper plugins and priority support (early-bird pricing started at $60 for the first year, renewing at the $120 list price), and enterprise deployments are priced separately, making it freemium overall.
SurfSense is for researchers, professionals and teams who love the NotebookLM workflow but cannot upload their documents to a cloud service, and for privacy-conscious users who want a research agent that runs entirely on their own hardware.