--- title: "SumizAI vs Fireplexity" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-fireplexity.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Fireplexity alternative? SumizAI and Fireplexity side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "fireplexity", "alternative to Fireplexity"] --- # SumizAI vs Fireplexity Looking for a Fireplexity alternative? SumizAI and Fireplexity side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Fireplexity is Fireplexity is an open source project (MIT license) built by the Firecrawl team — a blazing-fast, Perplexity-style AI search engine that answers questions in real time while attaching concrete, clickable source citations to every answer. Responses stream word by word, and the underlying data comes live from the web via the Firecrawl engine, which handles crawling, content extraction, and site mapping. Unlike closed, commercial AI search products, Fireplexity's entire codebase is public on GitHub and can be self-hosted. By default, answer generation runs on GPT-4o-mini, but the project's architecture lets anyone swap in any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so a team can switch models without rewriting the application. Every part of a generated answer is tied to a specific source, and hovering over a citation instantly previews the page the information came from, without leaving the results view. The project covers general web search as well as news and image search. Spinning up a personal instance of Fireplexity is straightforward for anyone with basic development skills: cloning the repository, installing dependencies with npm install, adding API keys to a .env.local file, and running npm run dev is enough to get the app running locally at localhost:3000. That makes Fireplexity a solid foundation for an internal company knowledge base, a specialized research tool, or a dedicated answer engine for a specific domain — law, medicine, or a product's own technical documentation, for instance. Working with Fireplexity — whether the hosted version or a personal fork — means asking questions and getting back cited answers that naturally deserve to be kept for later: a confirmed fact along with its source, a comparison of several answers to related questions, conclusions from a research session. The chat interface itself doesn't offer a lasting archive of that knowledge — once the browser tab closes, history usually disappears or becomes hard to search after a while. That's exactly the gap standalone ai notes are meant to fill, surviving well past a single search session and letting someone return to their findings weeks later. SumizAI was designed with precisely this moment in mind: after getting a citation-backed, trustworthy answer from Fireplexity, a user saves it as ai notes in a local Markdown file, together with the source link. Someone running an extended technical research session, asking Fireplexity dozens of related questions, gains a single place to collect their ai notes — searchable, open, and independent of whether they're using the public instance or their own self-hosted fork. That ai notes collection grows with every research session instead of scattering across dozens of browser tabs. A developer self-hosting Fireplexity for their team can also treat SumizAI as a complementary documentation layer: every important research session ends with the findings saved as fresh these notes, gradually building an internal team knowledge archive that can't accidentally vanish along with browser history or during a migration to a newer version of the self-hosted instance. Because Fireplexity is open source, some teams go a step further and modify its interface so a search result can be exported directly into a note file with a single click — a natural extension of the project that pairs blazing-fast search with a lasting, searchable knowledge archive instead of leaving everything trapped in browser memory. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Open Source - Origin: United States - Category: AI Chatbot ## What SumizAI is A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk. A vault is a directory holding `base.md`, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a `notes/` folder with one `.md` file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist. The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used. ## Where they differ - Fireplexity is a place to have the conversation. SumizAI is not a chatbot — the conversation is the input, not the product. What comes out of it is a `.md` file with a title, a place in `base.md` and a duplicate check against the notes already in the vault. If you only want to talk to a model, you do not need SumizAI. - Fireplexity is open source (MIT), and SumizAI is not. If reading the source is what decides it for you, that is a real argument for Fireplexity. The guarantee SumizAI offers instead is structural rather than legal: the notes are Markdown files in a folder you chose, so they open in any editor whether or not the application is running. - AlternativeTo's description of Fireplexity does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard `.md` files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - Fireplexity is described as something more than one person uses at once. SumizAI is not: there are no shared vaults, no comments, no permissions and no sync between devices. If the work is a team's, that is a reason to pick Fireplexity over SumizAI. - Fireplexity can be self-hosted. SumizAI has nothing to host on the desktop — the vault is a folder on your machine — and if you want the model on your own hardware too, a local Ollama is one of the seven providers it speaks to. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Fireplexity. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. - Both search. SumizAI's search reads the whole note — title, summary, body and the original question and answer — rather than titles alone. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-fireplexity.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-fireplexity.html)