What is LEANN?
LEANN is an innovative vector database designed to democratize high-performance, personalized AI. It solves the critical challenge of complexity and cost associated with traditional vector solutions by transforming your personal device into a powerful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. For developers and personal AI users handling vast amounts of private data, LEANN delivers fast, accurate, and 100% private RAG capabilities with zero cloud costs and unparalleled efficiency.
Key Features
LEANN’s architecture is built on efficiency and privacy, enabling enterprise-grade search capabilities on consumer hardware.
💾 Smallest Vector Index and Extreme Storage Savings
LEANN is engineered to minimize resource consumption, achieving an impressive 97% reduction in storage compared to traditional vector databases without any loss in search accuracy. This efficiency is achieved through Graph-based Selective Recomputation, a novel technique that computes embeddings on-demand rather than storing massive, static embedding vectors, eliminating heavy storage overhead.
🔒 100% Private RAG with Zero Cloud Costs
Ensure complete data sovereignty. LEANN runs your RAG application entirely on your personal laptop, meaning your sensitive data never leaves your device. This complete localization eliminates the reliance on external cloud services, third-party APIs (like OpenAI), and associated costs, guaranteeing zero cloud expenses and total privacy.
📚 RAG on Everything: Comprehensive Data Ingestion
LEANN transforms disparate personal data sources into a unified, searchable knowledge base. It supports RAG across standard documents (.pdf, .txt, .md), proprietary communication logs (Apple Mail, WeChat, iMessage), web history, and complex agent memories (ChatGPT/Claude conversations), allowing you to query your entire digital history.
💻 Intelligent Code Chunking for Developers
For developers, LEANN provides native Claude Code integration and intelligent AST-Aware Code Chunking. This capability automatically understands and preserves the semantic boundaries of code (functions, classes, and methods) in languages like Python, Java, and TypeScript, enabling highly accurate, context-aware semantic code search and assistance.
⚙️ Flexible Configuration and Extensible Backends
LEANN provides a simple Python API and a powerful Command Line Interface (CLI) with flexible parameters for embedding models, search strategies, and data processing. It supports popular LLM backends (HuggingFace, Ollama, and any OpenAI compatible API) and allows users to select pluggable index backends like HNSW (default) and DiskANN.
Use Cases
LEANN empowers users to derive immediate, actionable insights from their most private and complex datasets.
1. Personal Knowledge Unification and Search
Consolidate years of scattered digital communication—from Apple Mail and iMessage conversations to browser history and archived documents—into a single, semantic search engine. You can ask complex questions and retrieve highly relevant answers based on your entire personal digital footprint, effectively searching your life like Google.
2. Advanced Codebase Navigation and Context-Aware Assistance
Developers can index vast code repositories and instantly perform semantic searches across their entire codebase. The AST-aware chunking ensures that when asking for context or debugging help, the RAG system retrieves entire, semantically relevant functions or classes, providing highly accurate context-aware assistance without the need for manual context injection.
3. Sophisticated Data Management and Filtering
Leverage the built-in metadata filtering system to manage and query your indexed data precisely. For instance, you can filter documents by specific dates or types, or perform highly targeted code searches by file extension, enabling sophisticated use cases like finding all Python functions written in a specific project last month, or quickly locating exact phrases using the included Grep Search option.
Conclusion
LEANN is the definitive solution for high-performance, private, and cost-effective personal AI. By leveraging innovative graph-based recomputation, it delivers the power of a scalable vector database while ensuring complete data privacy and minimal resource usage.
More information on LEANN
Launched
Pricing Model
Free
Starting Price
Global Rank
Follow
Month Visit
<5k
Tech used
LEANN was manually vetted by our editorial team and was first featured on 2025-11-12.
LEANN Alternatives
Load more Alternatives-
Embedchain: The open-source RAG framework to simplify building & deploying personalized LLM apps. Go from prototype to production with ease & control.
-
-
DeepSearcher: AI knowledge management for private enterprise data. Get secure, accurate answers & insights from your internal documents with flexible LLMs.
-
-
