Khoj vs Ollama

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.

Ollama

An OpenAPI 3.1 file for the 15 native operations and llms.txt with 68 links to Markdown pages. No credential on the local API, and any caller that reaches it can pull, push, create and delete models.

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

Ollama

1. Send "stream": false for one JSON body. The native routes stream NDJSON by default
2. Set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=64000 or options.num_ctx before agent work. The default is 4k below 24 GiB of VRAM
3. Back off on a 503. It means the queue (512 by default) is full
4. Put an authenticating proxy in front before binding past 127.0.0.1. The server checks no credential
5. Expect model names with a cloud tag to run on Ollama's servers. They need ollama signin and fail with OLLAMA_NO_CLOUD=1