I was thinking, that some folks in this community will be interested to see what current options are on local deep research field. So I spent some time to collect everything I could find together. Enjoy.
TLDR: the most healthiest and local-friendly projects are "GPT Researcher" by assafelovic and "Local Deep Research" by LearningCircuit.
"Local Deep Research" by LearningCircuit
Observations:
- python
- alive - last commit made yesterday
- medium number of contributors - 46
- 75 opened issues (half from the contributor, half from users but no comments for long months) / 254 closed (many self-reported)
- 161 opened PR (many from contributor hanging for long weeks - what's the point??) / 3309 closed PRs (visually 95% from contributor or dependobot)
- uses SearXNG
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/F4o4jCL4IA
Subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalDeepResearch/
Github - https://github.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research
Benchmark - https://huggingface.co/datasets/local-deep-research/ldr-benchmarks
"STORM" by Stanford
Observations:
- python
- abandoned - last commit 8 months ago
- small number of contributors - 23
- 58 opened issues (many bug reports with no replies) / 164 closed (mostly without resolution as not planned)
- 60 PRs (mostly with no replies) / 111 closed (for last 2 years just cancelled)
- uses various retrival services - YouRM, BingSearch, VectorRM, SerperRM, BraveRM, SearXNG, DuckDuckGoSearchRM, TavilySearchRM, GoogleSearch, and AzureAISearch
Github - https://github.com/stanford-oval/storm
Website - https://storm-project.stanford.edu/
"GPT Researcher" by assafelovic
Observations:
- python + typescript
- semi-alive - last commit 3 weeks ago
- poorly maintained - lots of stale branches
- large number of contributors - 211
- 173 opened issues (almost no reaction to 2026 issues) / 511 closed (mostly with fixes)
- 44 opened PRs (some are 6 months old without review and comments) / 785 closed (60-70% merged)
- obsessed with MCP - internet search & web scraping is done via separate MCP https://github.com/assafelovic/gptr-mcp which uses 3rd party API
Github - https://github.com/assafelovic/gpt-researcher
Documentation - https://docs.gptr.dev/
Website - https://gptr.dev/
"Local Deep Research" by LangChain
Observations:
- python
- semi-alive - last commit 2 weeks ago
- small number of contributors - 14
- 36 opened issues (many with no reply) / 39 closed (with solutions)
- 6 opened PR (some are hanging more than a year) / 48 closed (mostly from dependabot, no recent contributions from users)
- DuckDuckGo, SearXNG + commercial providers
Github - https://github.com/langchain-ai/local-deep-researcher
"Open Deep Research" by LangChain
What are these LangChain guys smoking? Two similarly named projects, one is most probably a successor of the other, but not a word being said on readme about it.
Observations:
- python + Jupyter notebook (???)
- abandoned - last dev work by human ended in Aug 2025
- small number of contributors - 26
- 34 opened issues (no replies since Nov 2025) / 95 closed ones
- 24 opened PRs (no comments/ no reviews) / 114 closed ones (community contribution is mostly discarded)
- no info on what it uses as internet search engine
GitHub - https://github.com/langchain-ai/open_deep_research
"Open Deep Research" by Together
Observations:
- python
- abandoned - last commit year ago, 3 commits in total
- one contributor
- no opened and closed issues
- no PRs
- relies on TAVILY for web search
Github - https://github.com/togethercomputer/open_deep_research
Blogpost - https://www.together.ai/blog/open-deep-research
"Deer flow" (Deep Exploration and Efficient Research Flow) by ByteDance
Supports any OpenAI compatible providers
Observations:
- python
- alive - last commit 19 minutes ago
- large number of contributors - 253
- 444 opened issues (mostly from Chinese folks, many have replies) / 735 closed (half with code changes)
- 257 opened pull requests, lots are pending for review and merge / 1230 closed (visually 70% merged)
- uses "Info Quest" for internet search (proprietary, paid)
Github - https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow
Website - https://deerflow.tech/
"Deep Research" by Alibaba
Observations:
- python
- abandoned - last commits months ago
- small number of contributors - 27
- focused on using a single model - their own "Tongyi-DeepResearch-30B-A3B"
- vendor locked-in - glued its ass to Serper.dev for search and Jina.ai for scraping
Github - https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/DeepResearch
"MiroThinker" by MiroMindAI
Observations:
- semi-alive - last commit 3 weeks ago
- small number of contributors - 19
- focused on using their own models - "MiroThinker-1.7-mini" (30B) or "MiroThinker-1.7" (235B)
- vendor locked-in - bring your own SERPER_API_KEY, JINA_API_KEY
- tried to run a test research from their demo page - fall on it's face
Github - https://github.com/MiroMindAI/MiroThinker
Website - https://www.miromind.ai/
"Deep-searcher" by Zilliztech
Observations:
- abandoned - last commit 6 months ago
- small number of contributors - 31
- 40 issues, 50 closed
- 6 pending PRs, 167 closed (mostly merged)
Github - https://github.com/zilliztech/deep-searcher
PS
No LLM assisted research tools were used to gather the above table. Just me and my own hands. Only few out of the above projects had a demo website - Mirothinker, Storm and DeerFlow - but:
- Mirothinker produced a quite comprehensive report after an hour, but it hallucinated one half of github metrics and didn't give a fuck to collect the other half. Untrusted and unusable.
- Storm is basically unusable for deep research tasks as you cannot provide an extended instruction on what to research and what kind of results you need, just a shitty short string of how your research paper should be titled
- DeerFlow site is just broken, cannot get past the authentication + various 404. Shame on you, ByteDance web developers!
If you have time and your local deep research agent is sitting nearby, try to give it below prompt. I'm sincerely curious what your results will be. Especially how many hallucinations in github figures.
Find and compare the best local deep research projects. Compose a table with results. The table must contain: - vendor / company name - project name - github URL - product website or blog URL where it was announced - when the last commit to github was made - number of github issues and PRs - number of contributors to github project - if project docs are suggesting to use a bespoke LLM model - if project is coming with its own web search and web page scraping tool [link] [comments]
