A LOCAL NOTEBOOKLM ALTERNATIVE

A NotebookLM alternative for documents you cannot upload

NotebookLM is a genuinely good tool. If you are happy uploading your documents to Google, use it — it is free, its citations are excellent, and its free tier (50 sources per notebook) is larger than ours. This page is for the other case: the documents you are not allowed, or not willing, to put on someone else's server. That is the whole reason GI JI exists.

The difference that decides itNotebookLMGI JI

Where your documents goUploaded to Google's cloudStay in a folder on your own computer

Local document answers after setupNo — it is a cloud serviceAfter setup, GI JI needs no internet to read your documents and answer questions from them.

Free tier50 sources per notebook20 documents, no time limit

When the answer is not thereAnswers from what it hasIn Sources only, can stop; no answer-writing call is made for that refusal

PriceFree; paid tiers for more$79 one-time, no subscription

If your work makes uploading impossible

Lawyers with client files, therapists with session notes, accountants with client accounts, researchers under an ethics approval — for all of them, uploading is not a step they can take. GI JI works on the machine by default. Optional Connected AI uses your own OpenAI API account. Setting up a key contacts OpenAI to list the models available to that account. Connected AI is off until you switch it on. Before it writes anything for you, GI JI stops, shows you what it wants to send, and waits for you to approve that one request.

The honest limit, said here so you do not discover it later

In Sources only, GI JI can stop when it cannot attach enough evidence from your own documents. That means some questions you would call answerable may come back without an answer. The trade is visible: this mode favours a bounded response over a plausible one.

WATCH IT WORK

Answer, cited passage, and an honest refusal.

Ask a question of your own documents, open the cited passage, then use Sources only for a question the library does not support and watch GI JI stop without writing an answer.

Watch on its own page with the scene-by-scene guide →

HOW GI JI COMPARES

Where GI JI wins, and where it does not.

Three comparisons with the tools you are most likely choosing between, each one naming the case where the other tool is the better buy.

WRITTEN FOR ONE READER

Four pages that answer one question properly instead of all of them briefly — what a citation is actually worth, what GI JI is and is not for a technical reader, how it stands beside a note library, and what it does for work whose material cannot leave the computer.

Try GI JI free See pricing