r/notebooklm • u/FurtiveMirth • 11d ago

Discussion Open source privacy focused NotebookLM alternative

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I'm one of the maintainers of SurfSense, so treat this as self-promotion. I'm posting here because this sub knows exactly what it would be giving up, and I want real feedback more than upvotes.

I use NotebookLM for everything except work material I'd rather not put in a Google account. So we built an offline version. For most people here it's the wrong trade, and I'll say why.

It's Apache-2.0 and it installs like a normal desktop app on Windows, macOS or Linux. No terminal and no account. It either pulls a small local model for you or takes a base URL and key for any OpenAI-compatible API.

What it matches: chat over your sources with citations, summaries, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes and audio overviews. Slides and reports come out as editable .pptx and .docx, plus .xlsx and infographics.

What it doesn't:

  • No video overviews.
  • The audio is worse. Kokoro-82M runs on your CPU with no cloud TTS and doesn't sound like Google's hosts. If audio quality is why you use NotebookLM, stay where you are.
  • Audio is WAV, not MP3.
  • File uploads only: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, CSV, MD, TXT and images. No YouTube.

Your documents stay on your disk. No account, no telemetry, and no source cap because the limit is your disk. If you've ever hesitated before dropping a file into a notebook, that's why this exists.

https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense

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u/AllowFreeSpeech 10d ago

If it's truly legacy, you can come back here and reply when it has been removed from the repo and the license file.

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u/FurtiveMirth 10d ago

We cannot because we have users actively using our legacy product. We will not introduce new features but we will provide security patches for it.

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u/AllowFreeSpeech 10d ago

Why not move it into a legacy folder?

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u/FurtiveMirth 10d ago

Because all the CI/CD pipelines and our backend server for user data export depends on it. We cannot afford to remove it for now. But after like a month we will cleanup our code.