# kotaemon: An Open-Source RAG Tool for Document Chat

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kotaemon is an open-source, RAG-based tool designed to facilitate interactive conversations with your documents. It provides a clean and customizable UI, catering to both end-users seeking document Q&A and developers building RAG pipelines.

GitHub: https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon
OSRepos URL: https://osrepos.com/repo/cinnamon-kotaemon

## Summary

kotaemon is an open-source, RAG-based tool designed to facilitate interactive conversations with your documents. It provides a clean and customizable UI, catering to both end-users seeking document Q&A and developers building RAG pipelines.

## Topics

- chatbot
- llms
- open-source
- rag
- Python
- document-qa
- ai-tools

## Repository Information

Last analyzed by OSRepos: Sat Nov 22 2025 16:00:53 GMT+0000 (Western European Standard Time)
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GitHub clicks: 5

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## Content

## Introduction
kotaemon is an open-source, RAG-based tool designed to facilitate interactive conversations with your documents. It offers a clean and customizable UI, built for both end-users who want to perform QA on their documents and developers looking to build their own RAG pipelines. This project aims to provide a functional RAG UI, supporting various LLMs, easy installation, and a robust framework for RAG pipeline development.

For end-users, kotaemon provides a clean and minimalistic UI for RAG-based QA, compatibility with various LLM API providers (OpenAI, AzureOpenAI, Cohere, etc.), and local LLMs (via `ollama` and `llama-cpp-python`), along with easy installation. Developers benefit from a comprehensive framework for building RAG pipelines, a customizable UI built with Gradio, and a dedicated Gradio theme.

Key features include hosting your own document QA web-UI with multi-user login and file organization, support for various LLM and embedding models, a hybrid RAG pipeline for optimal retrieval quality, multi-modal QA support for documents with figures and tables, and advanced citations with in-browser document preview. The system also supports complex reasoning methods like question decomposition and agent-based reasoning (ReAct, ReWOO), and offers a configurable settings UI.

## Installation
To get started with kotaemon, ensure you meet the system requirements: Python >= 3.10. Docker is optional but recommended for an easier setup. For processing additional file types beyond `.pdf`, `.html`, `.mhtml`, and `.xlsx`, you may need to install Unstructured.

### With Docker (Recommended)
kotaemon provides `lite`, `full`, and `ollama` Docker images. The `full` version includes `unstructured` for broader file type support, while `ollama` bundles Ollama for local RAG.

To run the `lite` version:
bash
docker run \
-e GRADIO_SERVER_NAME=0.0.0.0 \
-e GRADIO_SERVER_PORT=7860 \
-v ./ktem_app_data:/app/ktem_app_data \
-p 7860:7860 -it --rm \
ghcr.io/cinnamon/kotaemon:main-lite

Access the WebUI at `http://localhost:7860/`. You can specify the platform (e.g., `--platform linux/arm64`) if needed.

### Without Docker
1. Clone the repository and install required packages:
shell
git clone https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon
cd kotaemon
pip install -e "libs/kotaemon[all]"
pip install -e "libs/ktem"

2. Create a `.env` file based on `.env.example` in the project root for initial model configuration.
3. (Optional) For in-browser PDF viewer, download and extract [PDF_JS_DIST](https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/releases/download/v4.0.379/pdfjs-4.0.379-dist.zip) to `libs/ktem/ktem/assets/prebuilt`.
4. Start the web server:
shell
python app.py

The app will launch in your browser. Default login is `admin`/`admin`.

## Examples
kotaemon offers several ways to experience its capabilities:
*   **Live Demos:** Explore interactive versions on Hugging Face Spaces:
    *   [Live Demo #1](https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon)
    *   [Live Demo #2](https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon-demo)
*   **Local RAG with Colab:** Try a local RAG setup using the provided [Colab Notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1eTfieec_UOowNizTJA1NjawBJH9y_1nn).
*   **Visual Previews:** The repository includes preview images showcasing the user interface, such as the chat tab and advanced citation features with in-browser PDF viewer.

## Why Use kotaemon?
kotaemon stands out as a powerful and flexible solution for document Q&A due to several compelling reasons:
*   **Open-Source & Community-Driven:** Being open-source, it fosters transparency, community contributions, and continuous improvement.
*   **Comprehensive RAG Capabilities:** It provides a robust, hybrid RAG pipeline with full-text and vector retrieval, re-ranking, and support for complex reasoning methods like question decomposition and agent-based approaches (ReAct, ReWOO).
*   **Versatile LLM Support:** Seamlessly integrate with popular LLM API providers (OpenAI, AzureOpenAI, Cohere) or leverage local models via Ollama and `llama-cpp-python` for private RAG solutions.
*   **User-Friendly & Customizable UI:** The clean and minimalistic Gradio-based UI is intuitive for end-users, while its extensibility allows developers to customize or add new UI elements and integrate custom RAG pipelines.
*   **Advanced Features:** Benefit from multi-modal QA support (figures, tables), detailed citations with in-browser PDF preview and relevance scoring, and configurable settings to fine-tune retrieval and generation processes.
*   **Easy Deployment:** With Docker support and clear installation guides, setting up your own document QA web-UI is straightforward.

## Links
*   **GitHub Repository:** [https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon](https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon)
*   **Live Demo #1:** [https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon](https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon)
*   **Live Demo #2:** [https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon-demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon-demo)
*   **Online Install:** [https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/online_install/](https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/online_install/)
*   **Colab Notebook (Local RAG):** [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1eTfieec_UOowNizTJA1NjawBJH9y_1nn](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1eTfieec_UOowNizTJA1NjawBJH9y_1nn)
*   **User Guide:** [https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/](https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/)
*   **Developer Guide:** [https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/development/](https://cinnamon.github.io/kotaemon/development/)
*   **Feedback:** [https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon/issues](https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon/issues)
*   **Contact:** [mailto:kotaemon.support@cinnamon.is](mailto:kotaemon.support@cinnamon.is)
*   **Gradio Theme:** [https://github.com/lone17/kotaemon-gradio-theme](https://github.com/lone17/kotaemon-gradio-theme)