Kortix vs AnythingLLM: document chat, or an open-source system a team owns?

AnythingLLM is a strong local-first app for chatting with your documents; Kortix is the open-source AI Management System a team chooses as its alternative when the work has to be shared and governed. Both are open source, and both run on the models you choose. AnythingLLM fits one person, or a small group, who wants private document chat. Kortix fits a company whose agents, memory and connectors need to live somewhere it owns.

What AnythingLLM is great at

AnythingLLM is Mintplex Labs' all-in-one, local-first AI app: chat with your documents, a no-code agent builder, built-in agents, MCP compatibility, multi-modal support, a full developer API, and local-first operation with Docker, AWS, GCP and one-click deployment templates (AnythingLLM on GitHub).

• Local-first by default. AnythingLLM runs locally with little setup, ships desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, and deploys through Docker or a cloud template.
• Document chat with citations. Drag-and-drop uploads cover PDF, TXT and DOCX, answers cite their sources, and a collector pipeline parses large document sets.
• No-code agents and MCP. A no-code agent builder, agents that run inside a workspace, and MCP compatibility bring external tools in without code.
• Broad model support. AnythingLLM works with every popular closed and open-source LLM provider, several vector databases and a full developer API.
• MIT licensed. The project is MIT licensed, so you can read, modify and ship it (AnythingLLM LICENSE).

Where a workspace-scoped document chat stops for a team

AnythingLLM is built around the workspace, so its state and its execution stay close to one workspace (AnythingLLM on GitHub).

• Memory is per workspace. AnythingLLM's automatic and user-managed memories remember information about a user or a workspace, so one workspace's knowledge does not become a shared company brain.
• Multi-user is Docker-only. Multi-user support and permissioning ship in the Docker version, and the desktop app stays single-user.
• One instance, no machine per session. AnythingLLM's agents run inside the workspace app, so an agent that installs packages or breaks something shares the instance with everyone else.
• No review gate. AnythingLLM keeps finished work in the chat or the workspace, and nothing opens a change request a human reads as a diff before an agent touches a live system.

For a person chatting with their own files, none of that is a flaw; it is what an all-in-one document app should be.

One company repo you own

Kortix keeps the agents, the skills they share, company memory, connector config and triggers as plain files in one git repository you own (Kortix on GitHub). You can grep the whole company, diff any change and roll any part of it back, because the configuration is version controlled and does not sit inside a product database.

A new teammate clones the Kortix repo and gets the whole company: agents written in Markdown, runtime config in kortix.yaml, and every change to an agent or a skill arriving as a diff you review. Kortix runs any model with your own keys, chosen per agent, per session or per message.

Every session gets its own computer

Every Kortix session runs on its own isolated Linux computer, on a branch named after the session. The agent can install, run and break anything, and only what it commits survives. Work reaches the main branch through a change request a human reads as a diff, and thousands of sessions run in parallel on the same configuration.

Kortix connects to 3,000+ apps plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL or HTTP API (kortix.com). Connector credentials are brokered server-side, so the raw key never enters the machine, and each tool call can be set to allow, ask or block. Self-hosting runs on a laptop, a VPS, your VPC or on-prem, or you can use the managed cloud. Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0): self-host, read and modify the code.

Where AnythingLLM is the better pick

For a person or a small team whose work is document chat, AnythingLLM is the better pick. It runs locally by default with little setup, one desktop download gets you chatting with your files, and the MIT licence lets you read and modify the whole app. If all you need is a private ChatGPT over your own documents, AnythingLLM gets you there with less to stand up than Kortix.

Side by side

When to pick which

Pick Kortix when a team has to own and govern its agents: agents, skills, memory and connector rules in one repo you own, every session on its own isolated Linux computer, and each change landing as a diff a human approves. You choose the model per agent with your own keys, and you can self-host on a laptop, a VPS, your VPC or on-prem, or use the managed cloud.

Pick AnythingLLM when the work is document chat for one person or a small group that wants a local-first app under a permissive licence, and the team does not need one shared company memory, per-session isolation or a review gate.

If you are still choosing, read how the self-hosted AI workspace options compare, and how Kortix lines up against Open WebUI.

Free to start, free to self-host. Get started with Kortix.