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SurfSense: The Open-Source NotebookLM Alternative for Open Web Research

SurfSense is the open-source NotebookLM alternative for AI agents, an open web research platform with live data connectors. Your agents research the live web with structured data from Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, and any page on the open web, through one REST API or MCP server. Scheduled and event-triggered agents turn what they find into briefs and alerts, and a built-in knowledge base keeps every finding searchable with citations.

[!NOTE] 📢 A note for our NotebookLM-alternative users

For the past couple of months we built SurfSense as the best general research agent for your own knowledge, and that chapter earned us a community we are genuinely proud of. Agentic tools like Claude, OpenCode, Hermes, and OpenClaw have now proven that agents are the future, and reasoning over a static index is becoming something every capable agent does out of the box. What agents still lack is live data from the places where answers actually live, and the workflows around it. That is where we are pointing all of our energy: giving agents the primitives to research the open web.

Nothing you rely on is going away. Your knowledge base, chat with citations, reports, podcasts, presentations, automations, and collaborative chats all keep working, and self-hosting stays free and open source. Read the full announcement on our changelog.

Table of contents

• Why agents need SurfSense
• Live data connectors
• Quick start
• Everything else in the box
• How SurfSense compares
• Roadmap
• Contribute

Why agents need SurfSense

Ask any capable agent "what is Reddit saying about this product since launch?" or "what do the reviews of these ten places actually complain about?" and it has nowhere trustworthy to look. Official platform APIs are rate-limited, priced for enterprises, or missing entirely; scraping plumbing is brittle; and driving a browser with an LLM burns minutes and tokens per page. SurfSense gives agents the primitives instead:

• One typed surface for wherever the data lives. Every connector is a REST endpoint returning structured JSON — posts, comments, transcripts, reviews, SERPs, pages. No rate-limit roulette, no HTML parsing, no browser loop.
• An MCP server that exposes every connector as a native tool (surfsense_reddit_scrape, surfsense_google_search, and more) to Claude, Cursor, or any agent framework.
• An agent harness, not just raw data: retries, structured output, and credit metering are built in, so agents go from a question to a cited brief without you building the plumbing.
• Open source and self-hostable, so your research stays on your own infrastructure.

Live data connectors

Connector	What your agents get	Learn more
Reddit	Posts, comments, and subreddit streams without the official API's rate limits	Reddit Scraper API
YouTube	Videos, transcripts, and comment threads at scale	YouTube Scraper API
Instagram	Public profiles, posts, and reels without the Graph API	Instagram Scraper API
TikTok	Videos, comments, hashtags, and profiles without Research API approval	TikTok Scraper API
Google Maps	Places, ratings, and reviews for local business research	Google Maps Scraper API
Google Search	Live SERPs for search research and monitoring	Google Search API
Amazon	Public product data: prices, ratings, offers, sellers, and best-seller ranks	Amazon Product API
Web Crawl	Any page on the open web as clean, structured content	Web Crawling API
External MCP Connectors	Bring any MCP server to your agents, with one-click OAuth for Notion, Slack, Jira, and more	External MCP Connectors

The connector catalog is growing beyond social platforms and search; every new source lands as a typed endpoint on the same API and MCP server.

Billing is pay as you go: connectors bill per item actually returned, crawls per page successfully fetched, and failed calls are never billed. Self-hosted installs run with billing off. See pricing.

Quick start

Call a connector from code

Every connector is a REST endpoint you can call from any language with your SurfSense API key:

curl -X POST "$SURFSENSE_API_URL/workspaces/$WORKSPACE_ID/scrapers/reddit/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SURFSENSE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "search_queries": ["your brand"],
    "community": "SaaS",
    "sort": "top",
    "time_filter": "week"
  }'

Each connector page has copy-paste examples in Python, JavaScript, Go, PHP, Ruby, Java, and C#.

Give the tools to your agents over MCP

Add the SurfSense MCP server to Claude, Cursor, or your own agent framework:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "surfsense": {
      "url": "https://mcp.surfsense.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${SURFSENSE_API_KEY}" }
    }
  }
}

Your agent can now call every connector as a native tool. See the SurfSense MCP server page for the full tool list, or run the server locally from surfsense_mcp.

Use the cloud

Go to surfsense.com, log in, and ask the agent for live web data in plain English. New accounts start with $5 of free credit and no subscription.

Self-host for free

Run the entire platform, connectors, agents, automations, and the MCP server on your own infrastructure. Self-hosted installs ship with billing off, so scraping, crawling, and agent runs are limited only by your hardware and the model keys you bring.

Prerequisites: Docker Desktop must be installed and running.

For Linux/macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MODSetter/SurfSense/main/docker/scripts/install.sh | bash

For Windows:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MODSetter/SurfSense/main/docker/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

The install script sets up Watchtower automatically for daily auto-updates. To skip it, add the --no-watchtower flag. For Docker Compose, manual installation, and other deployment options, see the docs.

Everything else in the box

The research workspace that made SurfSense the leading open-source NotebookLM alternative is still here, and everything your agents gather lands in it.

Knowledge base

• Upload PDFs, Office docs, images, and audio, or sync Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. 50+ file formats supported.
• Hybrid semantic and full-text search with cited, Perplexity-style answers.
• AI file sorting auto-organizes documents by source, date, and topic.

Deliverable studio

• AI report generator with export to PDF, DOCX, HTML, LaTeX, EPUB, ODT, or plain text.
• Two-host AI podcasts from any document or folder in under 20 seconds.
• Editable slide decks, narrated video overviews, and AI image generation.

Automations

• Run full agent turns on a schedule or in response to events, described in plain English, with results written back to Notion, Slack, Linear, and Jira.

Team collaboration

• Real-time collaborative AI chats with comments and mentions.
• RBAC with Owner, Admin, Editor, and Viewer roles.

Desktop app

Native AI assistance in every application on your computer. Download from the latest release.

• General Assist: launch SurfSense from any app with a global shortcut.
• Quick Assist: select text anywhere, then ask AI to explain, rewrite, or act on it.
• Screenshot Assist: capture any region of your screen and ask AI about it.
• Watch Local Folder: auto-sync a local folder to your knowledge base. Point it at your Obsidian vault to keep your notes searchable.

No vendor lock-in

• 100+ LLMs via the OpenAI spec and LiteLLM, including GPT-5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
• 6,000+ embedding models and all major rerankers.
• Full local and private LLM support (vLLM, Ollama), so your data stays yours.

Video Agent Sample

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/012a7ffa-6f76-4f06-9dda-7632b470057a

Podcast Agent Sample

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a0a16566-6967-4374-ac51-9b3e07fbecd7

How to collaborate in real time (Beta)

1. Go to the Manage Members page and create an invite.

2. A teammate joins and that workspace becomes shared.

3. Make a chat shared and work in it together in real time, with comments to tag teammates.

How SurfSense compares

SurfSense is the only open-source product that combines a NotebookLM-style research workspace for people with live-data primitives for agents. Here is how that stacks up against each class of tool.

vs browser agents (Browserbase, Browser Use). Browser agents drive a real browser with an LLM in the loop — the right tool when a task needs clicking, logging in, or filling forms. But most research is read-only retrieval, and for retrieval the LLM-in-a-browser loop costs you minutes and thousands of tokens per page. A SurfSense connector call is one HTTP request: seconds, deterministic, and zero tokens spent deciding where to click.

vs scraping APIs (Firecrawl). Scraping APIs are great at turning a generic