Kotaemon
retrievalUpdate 07/2026 (assess → hold): The project has effectively gone dormant: the last release (v0.12.0) dates from May 2025, more than 200 issues are open, and the community is openly asking whether development continues (Releases, Discussion).
Kotaemon remains a readable reference implementation of RAG patterns (hybrid retrieval, reranking, GraphRAG integration), but we do not recommend it for new deployments. Actively maintained alternatives for self-hosted document chat: OpenWebUI and LibreChat.
Kotaemon is an open‑source, self‑hostable RAG-based platform offering document‑centric chat and QA. It caters to both non‑technical end users and developers seeking to build or demo document question‑answering workflows via a customizable Gradio UI.
For developers it provides a good demo on different RAG patterns.
Features
- Hybrid retrieval pipeline combining full-text and vector search, with re-ranking for higher relevance. Low‑confidence retrieval results are flagged.
- Multi-modal document support, including tables and figures, with citation previews directly in-browser. Highlighted text snippets are shown in citations.
- Advanced reasoning support, including question decomposition and agent‑style chains (e.g. ReAct, ReWOO) for complex queries.
- Integration of GraphRAG