I Tested 5 Open-Source NotebookLM Alternatives — Here's What Actually Works (opens in new tab)

Google's NotebookLM is great. But handing your research notes, PDFs, and meeting transcripts to Google's cloud is a hard sell for a lot of people — especially when those documents contain client data, unpublished research, or internal strategy. So I spent a weekend testing five open-source alternatives. Three things mattered: can I docker compose up in under 10 minutes, does the podcast feature actually work offline, and what breaks first? Here's what I found. The Contenders Project Deploy Ti...