SWIRL Community
Federated AI search and RAG across your stack, without moving your data
Ask a question. SWIRL searches your apps live, ranks the results, and returns an answer with sources you can click through to. Data stays where it lives. No vector database, no ETL, no second copy to govern. Open source, Apache 2.0, running on your machine in about two minutes.
⚡ Quick Start · 🧱 What you get · 🆚 Community vs Enterprise · 🔌 Connectors · 🤝 Contribute
This repository is SWIRL Community, Apache 2.0 and free to self-host. There is also SWIRL Enterprise, which adds a three-pass reranker, canonical answers, an MCP server for agents, and managed support. The comparison below lays out the difference, so you can tell which one you need.
🤔 Why SWIRL?
Most "AI search" asks you to copy everything into a vector database first, then govern that copy forever. SWIRL skips the copy. It queries your sources live, with the user's own permissions, re-ranks the results, and optionally generates an answer with citations using the LLM of your choice.
| ❌ The usual way | ✅ With SWIRL |
|---|---|
| Stand up a vector database | No vector DB needed |
| Move and duplicate your data | Data stays in place |
| Build ETL pipelines | Query live, in place |
| Weeks of infrastructure work | One Docker command, about 2 minutes |
| A new copy to secure and audit | Permissions enforced at the source |
🔥 Quick Start: Docker in 2 minutes
Make sure the Docker app is installed and running.
Download the compose file:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swirlai/swirl-search/main/docker-compose.yaml -o docker-compose.yaml
Optional, to enable real-time RAG with your own OpenAI key:
export MSAL_CB_PORT=8000
export MSAL_HOST=localhost
export OPENAI_API_KEY='<your-OpenAI-API-key>'
Start SWIRL:
docker-compose pull && docker-compose up
Then open , log in with admin / password, and run a search. SWIRL comes ready to search Arxiv, European PMC and Google News out of the box.
Note: the Docker version does not retain data or configuration when shut down. For a persistent install, see the Quick Start Guide. Watch the 60-second video tutorial to get going.
🧱 What SWIRL Community gives you
Apache 2.0, free, yours to run anywhere:
- Federated search and RAG across 100+ connectors, with your data left in place.
- The Galaxy UI, the same interface that powers SWIRL Enterprise.
- Real-time RAG with citations using your own OpenAI key.
- Microsoft 365 integration with OAuth2.
- Re-ranking with cosine vector similarity (spaCy large model plus NLTK), duplicate detection, and result mixers.
- A pipelined Processor architecture for transforming queries, responses and results.
- Synchronous or asynchronous federation over a clean REST API.
- Results stored in SQLite or Postgres for post-processing and analytics.
- Easily extensible Connector and Mixer objects, so adding a source is straightforward.
What teams build with it
- Knowledge base search across SharePoint, Confluence and Drive, with source links.
- Customer support assistants that search docs and tickets and draft grounded responses.
- Developer assistants over GitHub, Jira and documentation.
- Unified search across every tool, with results that respect existing permissions.
🆚 Community vs SWIRL 5 Enterprise
Community is genuinely useful and genuinely open. SWIRL 5 Enterprise is what you graduate to when search becomes infrastructure. We keep the line honest so you always know what you are running.
| Capability | Community (Apache 2.0) | SWIRL 5 Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Federated search and RAG, no data movement | Yes | Yes |
| Galaxy UI | Yes | Yes |
| 100+ connectors | Yes | Yes, plus managed connectors |
| RAG with your own LLM key | Yes | Yes |
| Relevancy ranking | Cosine similarity (spaCy, NLTK) | Three-pass pipeline: BM25, then E5 embeddings with hybrid fusion, then a cross-encoder |
| Canonical answers and Pinned Results | Not included | Yes |
| First-class MCP server for agents | Not included | Yes |
| Hallucination warning on generated answers | Not included | Yes |
| Business console with AI-Yield analytics, semantic cache and dedup at scale | Not included | Yes |
| SOC-2 hosting, managed connectors, and support | Not included | Yes |
If you outgrow cosine ranking, want canonical answers, or need your agents to call SWIRL over MCP, that is SWIRL 5.
When you outgrow Community
Plenty of teams run Community in production and never need more. If you do reach its edges, where you want the three-pass reranker, canonical answers, an MCP server for your agents, the hallucination warning, or managed connectors and support, that is what SWIRL Enterprise adds.
If that is where you are heading, you can talk to us for a walkthrough on your own systems. Nothing leaves your environment, and there is no obligation.
🔌 Connectors
The full, current list lives at swirlaiconnect.com/connectors. Connectors are easily extensible; see the Connector objects and the Developer Guide. To request a connector, email [email protected].
📖 Documentation
Full docs: docs.swirlaiconnect.com. Start with the Quick Start Guide, then the User Guide and Developer Guide.
🤝 Contributing
SWIRL is built in the open and we welcome contributions. Good places to start:
- Browse open issues and look for
good first issue. - Join GitHub Discussions to ask questions and share what you are building.
- Write a connector or a mixer; the objects are designed to be extended.
Please read the Code of Conduct and Contributing guide in the repo before opening a pull request.
👷 Support and community
- Questions, ideas, or just a hello: [email protected].
- Follow along in the Bringing AI to the Data newsletter.
- Star the repo to follow releases; we ship often.
License
SWIRL Community is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE for details.