head to head · open source
Khoj vs fsnotes
Khoj has 37,970 GitHub stars, 2,530 forks, 148 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. fsnotes has 7,562 stars, 588 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Khoj leads on adoption by 402% (37,970 vs 7,562 stars). Khoj is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; fsnotes is written in Swift under MIT. Khoj has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, fsnotes 8%. fsnotes was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Khoj | fsnotes | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-08-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 588 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Khoj if
- You weight community size — 38K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick fsnotes if
- You want the fsnotes feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and fsnotes fits your workflow better
About Khoj
Your AI second brain 📑 Docs • 🌐 Web • 🔥 App • 💬 Discord • ✍🏽 Blog 🎁 New Meet 🌶️ Pipali our open source AI coworker that runs on your computer. Read about Khoj's excellent performance on modern retrieval and reasoning benchmarks. Overview Khoj is a personal AI app to extend your capabilities. It smoothly scales up from an on device personal AI to a cloud scale enterprise AI. Chat with any local or online LLM (e.g llama3, qwen, gemma, mistral, gpt, claude, gemini, deepseek). Get answers from the internet and your docs (including image, pdf, markdown, org mode, word, notion files). Access it from your…
About fsnotes
FSNotes 简体中文 · 繁體中文 Own your notes. Find them instantly. FSNotes is a fast, native notes app for macOS and iOS. It gives you a focused writing experience while keeping every note in portable Markdown or plain text files—not a proprietary database. Why choose FSNotes No lock in. Open and edit your notes with any compatible app, now or years from now. Fast at any scale. Search and navigate smoothly across collections of 10,000+ notes. Built around your workflow. Use multiple folders, external editors, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, and optional Git backups. More than basic Markdown. Connect ideas with tags and [[links]]…
read the full fsnotes overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Khoj or fsnotes more popular?
Khoj has 37,970 GitHub stars and fsnotes has 7,562. Khoj has the larger community by that measure.
Are Khoj and fsnotes free?
Both are open source. Khoj is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and fsnotes under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Khoj and fsnotes?
Khoj is written in Python and fsnotes in Swift. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Khoj or fsnotes?
Choose Khoj if you want the larger community (37,970 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose fsnotes if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.