AI Document Chat: Talk to Your Files with AnythingLLM and RAGFlow

AI document chat tools for private Q&A over your files: AnythingLLM for simplicity, RAGFlow for deep parsing. Real GitHub star data.

💡 What You Will Learn

AI document chat tools for private Q&A over your files: AnythingLLM for simplicity, RAGFlow for deep parsing. Real GitHub star data.

The killer app of RAG is simple: upload your documents, ask questions, get cited answers. The self-hosted options are now genuinely good.

The Contenders

AnythingLLM (64,393 stars) is the easiest: desktop or Docker, drag in PDFs, connect Ollama (177,874 stars), done - chunking, embeddings, and chat UI included. RAGFlow (87,018 stars) goes deeper with layout-aware parsing and page-level citations - the pick for complex documents. Danswer/Onyx (31,478 stars) adds Slack integration for team knowledge search. Khoj (36,367 stars) is the personal second brain with web and org-mode support.

The Practical Test

Upload your 100-page annual report to each and ask the same three questions - which tool returns the right page numbers? That test beats any benchmark table for your use case.

FAQ

Q: Do these work with scanned PDFs?
A: Only with OCR enabled - RAGFlow and AnythingLLM both support it, but accuracy drops and setup takes longer.

Q: Which is best for sensitive documents?
A: All run fully offline with local models; RAGFlow gives the most control over the parsing pipeline.