kotaemon
Open-source RAG UI for chatting with your documents.
About
kotaemon is an open-source, clean and customizable RAG UI for chatting with documents, built by Cinnamon AI with both end users and developers in mind. It provides a ready-made chat interface over a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline: upload documents, index them, and ask questions with grounded answers. Live demos are hosted on Hugging Face Spaces so the interface can be tried without installing anything.
It is aimed at teams that want a self-hostable document-QA front end they can adapt, rather than a closed SaaS. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed with over 25k GitHub stars, making it one of the most popular open RAG interfaces. Advanced configuration details are provider-documented in the repo README; core chat-with-docs functionality is demonstrated in the public demos.
What it can do
- Chat-with-documents web UI
- RAG indexing and retrieval pipeline
- Customizable for developer use cases
- Self-hostable (Docker support)
- Public Hugging Face demo instances
Setup
- Clone the repo and follow the README quickstart (Docker supported)
- Configure your LLM and embedding providers
- Or try the Hugging Face Spaces demo first
Prerequisites
Python/Docker environment; LLM and embedding API keys.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via official GitHub repo + Hugging Face Spaces demos, batch277; GitHub 25,807 stars; no official logo found — logoUrl null, letter-tile fallback; Trending score 86/100 from researcher assessment. License: Apache-2.0.
★ 25,807 GitHub stars
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.