SumizAI vs Kagi Assistant

What Kagi Assistant is

What Kagi Assistant is

Kagi Assistant is the AI add-on built into Kagi — a paid, ad-free, privacy-first search engine — giving access to more than 30 leading language models in one place, with optional support from Kagi Search results. Instead of a separate subscription for every model provider, a Kagi user switches between them from a dropdown menu in the same interface used for search.

Key features

Assistant mode turns the search interface into a chat interface powered by the chosen language model, with a toggle deciding whether the model should reach out to the web. When web access is on, the answer is built on Kagi Search results, complete with linked references to sources — so the AI answer isn't detached from the ability to check where it came from. Result personalization — up- or down-ranking specific domains, and "Lenses" filtering results for a particular field — works independently of Assistant mode, complementing search itself.

Who it's for

Kagi Assistant appeals to people already paying for Kagi for its ad-free, tracking-free search who want access to multiple AI models without creating a separate account with every provider. Researchers and developers appreciate being able to switch models quickly for a specific task without leaving one interface.

Use cases

In practice, Kagi Assistant works well for comparing how different models answer the same research question, for quick fact-finding with linked sources instead of a plain model hallucination, and for daily development work, where switching to a model better suited for code takes one click.

Pricing and business model

Kagi runs on a subscription model: Starter at $5/month (300 searches), Professional at $10 (unlimited searches), and Family at $14, with Kagi Assistant access scaling with the plan — Professional and higher get Assistant access proportional to the subscription's value. The Ultimate plan at $25/month unlocks the most advanced models with no interaction limits.

Limitations and what to watch for

Because Kagi is a paid search engine from the ground up, with no free tier offering full functionality, the entry barrier is higher than with free search engines or standalone free chatbots — you have to accept a subscription model for search itself before using Assistant.

AI notes from a search-and-chat session in one

Kagi Assistant offers no lasting notes archive — answers generated in chat mode have to be copied manually if they're meant to outlast the session itself. Someone running a longer research task with many queries to different models has to manually gather worthwhile fragments as ai notes into a separate archive so they aren't lost once the tab closes — and across several parallel research sessions, such ai notes can pile up fast in a single day.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before buying a plan, check how many searches and Assistant interactions you actually need per month to pick the right subscription tier — the price difference between plans can be significant if you underestimate your own usage, especially when Assistant is used regularly to build up ai notes from research sessions.

Bottom line

Kagi Assistant is an AI add-on inside a paid, private search engine, giving access to multiple models in one place without separate accounts for every provider. Anyone who wants worthwhile answers from such sessions to land automatically in a searchable ai notes archive instead of vanishing once the tab closes needs a separate tool for gathering them.

Comparison with SumizAI

Kagi Assistant and SumizAI differ fundamentally in scope. Kagi Assistant is an AI layer over a paid search engine, with no lasting knowledge store beyond the session itself. SumizAI is a separate notebook, where a conversation with one of seven supported providers — including part of the same model pool Kagi Assistant offers — ends as a Markdown file in a vault the user owns, with a table of contents and a duplicate check. Anyone who wants private search with AI in one interface will pick Kagi; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to build a lasting, searchable archive will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

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.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• Kagi Assistant 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.
• AlternativeTo's description of Kagi Assistant does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
• Kagi Assistant is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• AlternativeTo's description of Kagi Assistant 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.
• Kagi Assistant also does tasks. SumizAI does not — no boards, no due dates, no projects. It files knowledge, not work.
• Kagi Assistant runs in the browser. SumizAI is a desktop and mobile application, and on the desktop the vault is a folder on your own disk rather than a document in someone's cloud.
• Both search. SumizAI's search reads the whole note — title, summary, body and the original question and answer — rather than titles alone.

Which one to pick