Khoj vs LocalGhost

Khoj

AGPL-3.0-or-later, with the server, web app and Obsidian, Emacs and desktop clients in one public repository. No tagged release since 2.0.0-beta.28 on 26 March 2026 and no commit since 2 August.

LocalGhost

The server and Android app are MIT-licensed, with no telemetry libraries found. There is no agent API, MCP server or SDK; unpaired callers receive HTTP 503.

Khoj

1. Install with pip install --pre khoj or a 2.0.0-beta image tag. Plain pip install khoj and latest give 1.42.10 from July 2025
2. Point the Obsidian, Emacs or desktop client at your own server. They default to app.khoj.dev, which shut down on 15 April 2026
3. Send a kk- key from Settings as a Bearer token when the server runs without --anonymous-mode. In anonymous mode /auth isn't mounted and no key exists
4. Call GET /api/search?q=...&n=5 for passages and put file:"notes.md" or dt>="2026-01-01" inside q to filter. No route is documented
5. Set KHOJ_TELEMETRY_DISABLE=True before the first start. Tagged releases send the caller's IP with telemetry

LocalGhost

1. Don't call a LocalGhost box. Every request without the paired phone's certificate gets a 503 that looks like an outage
2. Reach a person's LocalGhost archive through the person and their phone. Nothing in wisp 0.0.3 opens it to an agent
3. Read a 503 from a box as no certificate, a retired phone, a locked box or a down daemon. The response never says which
4. Don't treat the README's list of what leaves the phone as complete. The app also calls Frankfurter, Wikipedia's summary API and Android's geocoder
5. Run ghost-cli ghost.<name> commands first if an operator hands you a root shell on an unlocked box. It lists command names only, takes key=value arguments and prints JSON