Open Notebook vs MaxKB
Two of the top rag and knowledge, side by side: score, setup, license, activity and what each review found.
Open Notebook
Self-hosted NotebookLM alternative with podcasts and 20+ model providers
MaxKB
Enterprise knowledge-base agent platform with RAG, workflows and MCP tools
| What we compare | Open Notebook | MaxKB |
|---|---|---|
| Score parts, out of 100 | ||
| Adoption | 80, widely used | 55, popular |
| Freshness | 100, active | 100, active |
| Maintenance | 84, healthy | 96, healthy |
| Easy to run | 50, easy | 50, easy |
| Agent-ready | 70, partly | 70, partly |
| Facts from GitHub and the README | ||
| Stars | 40.1k | 23k |
| License | MIT (permissive) | GPL-3.0 (copyleft) |
| Last commit | Oct 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| Last release | Oct 2026 | Sep 2026 |
| Language | TypeScript | Python |
| Docker | Yes | Yes |
| GPU | Not needed | Not needed |
| arm64 or Apple Silicon | Mentioned | Mentioned |
Open Notebook
Open Notebook collects PDFs, audio, video, web pages and Office files into notebooks and offers cited chat, full-text and vector search, notes and multi-speaker podcast generation. It runs as two containers (SurrealDB plus a FastAPI/Next.js app) and talks to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq, Ollama, LM Studio or any OpenAI-compatible server. A REST API and MCP integration expose the same features.
Who it is for: individual researchers who want a private NotebookLM
Strengths
- 20+ providers, including Ollama and LM Studio for fully local runs
- Podcasts with 1 to 4 speakers and custom episode profiles
- REST API on port 5055 and an MCP server for Claude Desktop or VS Code
- Two-service Docker Compose; keys stored encrypted with OPEN_NOTEBOOK_ENCRYPTION_KEY
Weaknesses
- Single-user; multi-user support is only a future direction in VISION.md
- No password by default and ports 8502/5055 bind to all interfaces
- Anthropic and Groq offer no embeddings, so a second provider is needed
- UI in 14 languages but provider setup is manual per model type
- no GPU
- Docker + Compose
- Needs SurrealDB
- Models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq, DeepSeek, xAI, OpenRouter, Cohere, Ollama, LM Studio, oMLX and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint
- port 8502
- README: alternative to NotebookLM
MaxKB
MaxKB runs as one Docker container (port 8080, state in one volume) with a RAG pipeline that uploads or crawls documents, a workflow engine with function library and MCP tool use, and zero-code embedding into other systems. It works with private models (DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen) and public APIs (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, MiniMax) and handles text, image, audio and video. Built on Django, LangChain and PostgreSQL.
Who it is for: companies building internal Q&A bots and customer service agents
Strengths
- Single docker run with all data under one mounted volume
- Workflow engine with function library and MCP tool calling
- Crawls online documents into the knowledge base automatically
- Multimodal input and output: text, image, audio, video
Weaknesses
- GPL-3.0 limits bundling into proprietary products
- Ships with default admin password MaxKB@123..
- README gives no hardware guidance or provider configuration detail
- Detailed docs are on maxkb.cn, partly in Chinese
- no GPU
- Models: OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, MiniMax, DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen as private models
- port 8080
More in RAG and knowledge
Building with these?
We help teams pick an open-source AI stack and run it in production. Client work never changes a rank.