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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

| Connector | What your agents get | Learn more | |---|---|---| | Reddit | Posts, comments, and subreddit streams without the official API's rate limits | Reddit Scraper API | | YouTube | Videos, transcripts, and comment threads at scale | YouTube Scraper API | | Instagram | Public profiles, posts, and reels without the Graph API | Instagram Scraper API | | TikTok | Videos, comments, hashtags, and profiles without Research API approval | TikTok Scraper API | | Google Maps | Places, ratings, and reviews for local business research | Google Maps Scraper API | | Google Search | Live SERPs for search research and monitoring | Google Search API | | Indeed | Public job postings with salaries and full descriptions, by search or company | [In…