Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Wolfram|Alpha

Perplexica is a privacy-focused AI answering engine designed to run on your own hardware. It combines web search results with local or hosted LLMs to generate natural-language answers with cited sources.

Key Features

• Web search integration powered by SearxNG to aggregate results from multiple engines
• Supports local models via Ollama and multiple cloud LLM providers via API configuration
• Answer generation with cited sources for traceability
• Multiple search modes (speed/balanced/quality) to trade off latency vs depth
• File uploads for document-based Q&A (such as PDFs, text files, and images)
• Image and video search alongside standard web results
• Domain-scoped search to focus results on specific websites
• Smart query suggestions and a local search history
• Built-in API for integrating search and answering into other applications

Use Cases

• Private, self-hosted alternative to Perplexity-style web answering for individuals or teams
• Research assistant that produces source-cited summaries from the open web
• Internal tool that combines uploaded documents with web search for faster troubleshooting

Limitations and Considerations

• Answer quality and latency depend heavily on the chosen model/provider and the availability/quality of web search results
• Some functionality requires external provider API keys when not using a local model

Perplexica is well-suited for users who want a Perplexity-like experience while keeping searches and data under their control. With SearxNG-based search, configurable LLM backends, and citations, it aims to balance privacy, usability, and answer reliability.