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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, Walmart, Google Maps, Google Search, Indeed, 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

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

• Downloadable