AnythingLLM

AnythingLLM is a desktop application and self-hostable platform that lets you chat with your documents, run AI agents, and work with large language models entirely on your own machine. No account required. No data leaves your device unless you explicitly connect to a cloud provider. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

The core use case is document chat. You load in PDFs, Word files, CSVs, codebases, or content pulled from online sources, then ask questions against that material. The underlying LLM can be a local model running on your own hardware or a cloud provider like OpenAI, Azure, or AWS. You pick which one, and you can switch between them. It also supports multi-modal models, so working with images or audio is possible within the same interface.

Privacy is a first-class concern. By default, everything stays local: the model, the vector database, the embedder, your documents, and your chat history. Nothing is shared unless you configure an external provider. That makes it a practical choice for anyone handling sensitive business documents who can't send data to third-party APIs — including use cases that would otherwise call for legal AI platforms.

For teams, there's a self-hosted or cloud-hosted option with multi-user support. Each user gets isolated access, and admins get fine-grained controls over what users can see and do. The platform can also be white-labeled with custom branding, which makes it usable as an internal tool under a company's own identity.

Beyond document chat, it includes a built-in developer API for integrating its capabilities into existing products. If you're building on top of it, the API fits naturally into the broader LLM application framework ecosystem. A community hub provides shared agent skills, system prompts, and slash commands, so you can extend what the assistant can do without building from scratch.

The MIT license means the source is open and free to use or modify. If you want a lighter-weight alternative focused purely on chat, tools like LLMChat or LobeChat cover that narrower scope. AnythingLLM sits closer to a full local AI workspace, with document ingestion, agent support, and multi-user access all in one place.