#2727th of 32 in RAG, knowledge and searchFor research, robotics and education
scira
AI search engine that plans multi-step research and answers with inline citations
- Stars
- 11.9k
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Last commit
- Aug 2026
- Language
- TypeScript
11,400 on 31 Mar 202611,903 on 20 Oct 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
Scira is a Next.js app that takes a question, uploaded file or URL, breaks it into sub-tasks, searches live sources and returns an answer with clickable citations. It has 17 search modes (web, academic, Reddit, X, YouTube, stocks, crypto and others) and 28 tools, and it routes to hosted models from xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others through the Vercel AI SDK. Self-hosting needs API keys for many third-party services.
Who it is for: Self-hosters wanting a cited, agentic AI search app over hosted models
Strengths
- 17 search modes, including academic, Reddit, YouTube, stocks and prediction markets
- Every answer carries inline citations linked to the retrieved sources
- Many hosted model families via one SDK, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, Qwen and DeepSeek
- Scheduled recurring research agents (Lookouts) email updates on tracked topics
Weaknesses
- Depends on many third-party APIs (Exa, Firecrawl, Tavily, Valyu, Supadata, Daytona)
- README lists no local model support such as Ollama or GGUF
- Connectors, Memory, Voice and XQL modes are marked Pro
- README is inconsistent on which API keys are required to run it
What it needs
- no GPU
- Docker + Compose
- Needs Exa, Firecrawl, Tavily, Parallel, Valyu, Supadata, Daytona, Upstash Redis, Cloudflare R2, Supermemory, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Database (DATABASE_URL), Better Auth
- Models: xAI Grok, OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Qwen
- port 3000
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