Scira
A self-hosted AI search engine with cited answers and recurring research agents, licensed under AGPL-3.0 and reliant on external services.
Alternative to:
Scira is an AI search engine for researching questions across live sources and checking the evidence behind an answer. You can self-host the application, but live research needs internet access and external services.
- Cited research: Scira breaks complex questions into smaller tasks, searches sources and cross-checks evidence, then provides clickable inline citations.
- Specialist searches: Search academic papers, Reddit, X and GitHub, or use YouTube transcripts and summaries; financial tools cover stocks, CoinGecko cryptocurrency data and Polymarket and Kalshi markets.
- Documents and URLs: Ask questions about web pages or uploaded PDF, CSV, DOCX and Excel files, with file search using Cohere embeddings and reranking.
- Recurring monitoring: Lookouts are scheduled research agents that monitor topics, track changes and send email updates.
- Analysis tools: A Python code interpreter runs in a Daytona sandbox and can produce charts during research.
Scira is open source under AGPL-3.0 and also has a hosted website. Supported model families include OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Qwen and DeepSeek. Self-hosters can bring their own models and connect custom tools; a separate chat mode answers without searching.
Self-hosting controls where the application runs, while search integrations, remote model providers and services such as Cohere and Daytona process the requests sent to them.
