Kortix vs AnythingLLM: an open-source AI Operating System or a document-chat app

Why open source matters when the work lives in the tool

AnythingLLM and Kortix are both open source, so you can read each project's code and run it yourself. The question that decides the fit is what a team keeps when it adopts the tool. AnythingLLM is a local-first app from Mintplex Labs for chatting with your own documents (anythingllm.com). It runs on your own computer, ingests PDFs, text files, and Word documents, and answers with citations. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector live in one git repo you own, and each session runs on its own cloud computer (Kortix on GitHub).

Open source matters most at the moment a tool becomes infrastructure. For a document-chat app, open source means you can point it at any model and skip a subscription. For a system that runs agents which take actions in your tools, the same openness reaches further: the agent definitions, the skills, the memory, the connector rules, and the triggers are files you can read, diff, and roll back. When the configuration is code, a change to how your company works arrives as a diff a person reviews, and a new teammate clones the repo to get the whole setup.

The Kortix alternative, in depth

Kortix keeps a company as one git repository. Agents are markdown files, skills are markdown plus scripts, memory is files that accumulate, and kortix.yaml declares the machine image, the connectors, and the triggers (Kortix docs). You can grep your whole company, diff any change, and roll any part of it back, because the configuration is version controlled in the repo.

Every session gets its own cloud computer: an isolated sandbox on a branch named after the session. The agent can install, run, and break anything; only what it commits survives, and session work reaches main through a change request a person approves. Merge is default-deny for agents. Thousands of agents in parallel on one config, each on its own cloud computer.

Kortix runs any model provider with your own keys, chosen per agent, per session, or per message. It connects to 3,000+ apps in a click, plus MCP, OpenAPI, Postman, GraphQL and raw HTTP. Connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine, and each tool call is set to Allow, Ask or Block, down to the arguments of each call. For teams that answer to a security review, Kortix adds per-resource permissions for people and agents, roles, groups, and an audit trail, SAML 2.0 single sign-on and SCIM 2.0, and secrets encrypted at rest with a key per project. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.

Where AnythingLLM still fits

AnythingLLM is a good pick for one person, or a small group, whose work is private document chat. It runs locally with little setup, ships desktop apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and deploys through Docker or a cloud template (AnythingLLM on GitHub). Multi-user support and permissioning ship in the Docker version, so a small team can share an instance, and the desktop app stays single-user.

The split is about scope. A document-chat app keeps its state in a workspace, and its agents run inside the same instance as everyone else. Kortix keeps its state in a repo it owns, gives each session an isolated cloud computer, and gates the work through review. Pick AnythingLLM when the job is reading your documents, and Kortix when a team has to own and govern agents that take real actions. For a longer version of this comparison, read Kortix's own write-up.