Vane
Privacy-focused AI answering engine you host yourself (formerly Perplexica).
About
Vane — previously called Perplexica — is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Perplexity. It pairs web search (via a self-hosted SearxNG instance) with your choice of local LLMs through Ollama or cloud providers (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Groq), and returns answers with cited sources.
It offers speed, balanced and quality search modes, plus sources for web, discussions and academic papers, and small UI widgets for weather, calculations and stocks. Everything runs on your own hardware, so queries stay private.
What it can do
- AI answers with cited sources
- Local LLM (Ollama) and cloud provider support
- Speed / balanced / quality search modes
- Web, discussion and academic sources
- Private metasearch via SearxNG
Setup
- Make sure Docker is installed.
- Run
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 -v vane-data:/home/vane/data --name vane itzcrazykns1337/vane:latest. - Optionally point it at your own SearxNG URL with
-e SEARXNG_API_URL=. - Open http://localhost:3000 and pick your model provider in settings.
Prerequisites
Docker; Ollama for local models or API keys for cloud providers; optional self-hosted SearxNG.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 37.3k stars (as Perplexica lineage); renamed from Perplexica to Vane — single-maintainer project, thinner bus factor. Manual review: self-hosted Perplexity alternative with SearxNG privacy story; search modes and widgets are real differentiators. License: MIT.
★ 37,286 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · 37.3k stars (as Perplexica lineage)
- · renamed from Perplexica to Vane — single-maintainer project, thinner bus factor
- · manual review: self-hosted Perplexity alternative with SearxNG privacy story; search modes and widgets are real differentiators
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.