Fluent Search vs Recoll

Fluent Search is a free, keyboard-driven search and productivity tool for Windows 10 or 11. It searches installed apps, files, browser history and bookmarks, commands, web results, open windows, settings, calculations, and on-screen interface elements. Screen Search puts character labels over clickable items so users can navigate and interact with them from the keyboard. A built-in file indexer is designed to scan quickly while keeping CPU usage low. Its index stores file metadata by default, not file contents, unless content indexing is enabled for selected paths. Optional semantic search and summarization run locally and can be switched off in Settings. Community plugins can add search sources, previews, actions, and YAML-based task workflows. Configurable web search includes engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, inline previews, and sending prompts to ChatGPT. The maker says searches, indexes, browser data, and most interactions are handled locally; depending on settings, diagnostics, suggestions, sync, and plugins may involve external communication. Windows x64 and ARM64 installers, APPX, portable builds, and Microsoft Store installation are listed. The maker describes ARM64 as newer and not yet battle-tested.

Recoll is free desktop search software that finds documents by their contents and file names. It indexes many common document formats and compressed files, including email attachments nested inside archives. Search supports Boolean queries, phrases, proximity, wildcards, and filters for file type or directory tree. Indexing can run periodically as a batch job or continuously for real-time updates. Users can search through a Qt desktop interface, a web browser, the command line, GNOME Shell, KDE KIO, or KRunner; the browser interface queries a Recoll index. A Python 3 extension can query or update that index. Recoll can index PDF attachments and annotations, extract custom XMP metadata, and apply OCR to image-only PDFs using Tesseract or ABBYY FineReader. It supports multiple languages and UTF-8, and users can choose a stemming language at query time. Linux and source are free under the GPL. A contribution is requested for the Windows binary, but no amount is stated. Some formats on Linux and macOS need external applications or libraries, and the Windows port lacks some features, including multithreaded execution.