Vane

What is Vane?

Vane is an open source answering engine written in TypeScript. You ask a question in plain language, it searches the web or a knowledge base you point it at, reads what it finds, and returns an answer with citations back to the sources. That is the same shape as commercial AI search products, with the difference that you run this one. Self hosting means the queries stay on your infrastructure, you choose which model answers, and you can point the retrieval step at private content instead of only the open web. The citation part matters more than it sounds: an answer engine without sources is just a model guessing, whereas links let you check the claim that the summary is built on. It is a web application you deploy rather than a library, so the result is a search interface your team opens in a browser.

Who is Vane for?

The strongest case is wanting AI search without sending every query to a third party. Teams with privacy requirements, or individuals who simply prefer their search history not to become someone else training data, get the same workflow with the logs in their own hands. It is also a good base for an internal knowledge tool, since pointing retrieval at your own documents turns it into a question interface over material that a public engine cannot see. The trade is operational. You maintain the deployment, you supply search and model access, and result quality depends on the model and the search backend you configure rather than on a vendor doing that tuning for you. Casual users are better served by a hosted product.

How does Vane compare?

Open WebUI is the closest in deployment feel, a self hosted browser interface for language models, but it is a chat front end first and search is not its organizing idea. Crawl4AI works one level down, producing model readable text from web pages, which you would use to build a retrieval pipeline rather than to ask questions directly. Graphiti is further from the surface still, maintaining a temporal knowledge graph as a memory layer for agents, which suits structured recall over time rather than answering a one off query with citations. Vane is the one that ships the finished search experience. Pick the others when you are assembling something custom and want the pieces rather than the product.

Compare with: Open WebUI, Crawl4AI, Graphiti

Vane pricing

The catalog records Vane as free, and the code is open source on GitHub, so there is no license fee and no subscription. Running it is not free of cost. You need somewhere to host it, a model to generate the answers, and a search source for the retrieval step, and both of the latter are usually paid services unless you run a local model and a self hosted index. For steady personal use the total is typically modest, and unlike a hosted product it scales with your own usage rather than a plan priced by user count.