Real-world comparison of Open Notebook, Notex, KnowNote, NotebookLM-Local, and InsightsLM. Setup time, hardware requirements, and honest limitations.
Google's NotebookLM is great. But handing your research notes, PDFs, and meeting transcripts to Google's cloud is a hard sell for a lot of people — especially when those documents contain client data, unpublished research, or internal strategy.
So I spent a weekend testing five open-source alternatives. Three things mattered: can I docker compose up in under 10 minutes, does the podcast feature actually work offline, and what breaks first?
Here's what I found.
The Contenders
Project
Google's NotebookLM introduces TikTok-style video summaries for research
NotebookLM adding Short Video Overviews with Nano Banana 2 Lite
I used Gemini’s Study Notebooks to organize my recipes — and it might be the best AI cookbook you’re not using
I connected NotebookLM and Claude — and built the ultimate AI research assistant
Originally published on andrew.ooo — visit the original for any updates, code snippets that aged...
I use NotebookLM every week and these are the new features I'm most excited about
Google just announced an update to NotebookLM, bringing enhanced research capabilities and support for several new output formats.
Google is giving NotebookLM a major upgrade. The research tool now runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, has its own cloud computer for code…
NotebookLM has some new capabilities around adding sources, coding, and producing documents. Here's what's new and how it works.
I use NotebookLM as an attack layer before I publish anything. Not for summaries. Not for research....
