Cinestar vs Coactive Content Discovery
Cinestar
cinestar.sourceforge.io
Coactive Content Discovery
coactive.aiSide by side
| Figure | Cinestar | Coactive Content Discovery |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · AI Video Search Tools | 9.1 (#2) | 7.7 (#13) |
| API | Cinestar’s site advertises an open API for creating custom plugins. | A REST API exposes semantic text-to-image and text-to-keyframe search, reverse image search, transcript search, person-identity filtering, and video search with shot drill-down. |
| Indexing | Vectors are stored in SQLite-Vec and organized with Llama 3.2. | The platform processes content once during ingestion and searches visual, transcript, and metadata signals without reprocessing. |
| Integrations | Listed plugin possibilities include Google Photos-style face recognition, social sharing, LDAP, audit trails, backups, compliance reporting, and multi-user access control. | Coactive names AWS, Databricks, and Microsoft as technology partners, and says its APIs can support integrations with third-party tools such as Mimir and Adobe Premiere. |
| Intended users | The maker presents personal media managers, content creators, media organizations, and academic or market researchers as use cases. | Coactive describes the platform as built for teams working with large image and video libraries, including content operations, data science, editorial, product, and engineering teams. |
| Purpose | Cinestar searches images and videos using local AI. | Content Discovery searches image, video, and spoken dialogue libraries using natural-language queries. |
Plans
In their own words
Cinestar
Cinestar is an open-source application for searching images and videos with locally run AI services. It can ingest folders or videos, transcribe audio with Whisper, embed frames with BGE, and create captions with Moondream. Natural-language searches return matching moments with timecodes and thumbnails. Cinestar stores vectors in SQLite-Vec and uses Llama 3.2 for language tasks and content organization. The maker says it has no analytics, telemetry, usage tracking, or data uploads. It is available for Linux and macOS under the MIT license, and the listed open-source core costs nothing. Local AI services require Ollama; the install guide lists BGE, Moondream, and Llama 3.2 model downloads totaling about 2–4 GB. The site describes plugins for functions including face recognition, metadata extraction, collaboration, backups, and multi-user access, plus an open API for custom plugins. The maker presents it for personal media managers, content creators, media organizations, and academic or market researchers. Its changelog lists v0.1.52, dated October 11, 2025, as the latest release on that page.
Coactive Content Discovery
Coactive Content Discovery searches large image, video, and spoken-dialogue libraries with natural-language queries. Its Agentic Discovery can combine visual scenes, spoken dialogue, environmental audio, recognized faces, and structured metadata in one search. Users can submit text, an image, or both; reference images can find similar content, related scenes, and near-duplicates. Transcript search handles semantic concepts and exact phrases, while audio search can locate non-speech sounds independently of visuals. Searchers can exclude unwanted content, with those constraints retained through follow-up queries and drill-downs. Video results can be narrowed to ranked shots shown as timestamped moments. The REST API includes text-to-image, text-to-keyframe, reverse-image, transcript, person-identity, and video shot-drill-down searches. Content is processed during ingestion so visual, transcript, and metadata signals remain searchable without reprocessing. Coactive documents organization-level SSO through SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect, including Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Google Workspace. The platform is offered through web and API access, with pricing available on request.