Kahana vs Picard.law

Kahana is a digital library built around hubs: curated spaces for files, notes, links, and collaborators. Hubs start private and can contain uploaded images, video, audio, PDFs, Office documents, and ZIP files, along with YouTube and webpage embeds. PDFs open in Kahana’s reader, and public-domain or openly licensed ebooks can be imported from Internet Archive. Clubs give groups a place to read, make lists, and talk together; new clubs also start private. Role-based access controls are available. Creators can charge once or monthly for hub access through Stripe Connect, including on the Free plan. Kahana charges a 5% transaction fee on Free and 3% on Growth, separate from Stripe processing. The web app works in desktop and mobile browsers. Free costs $0.00 per free and includes three hubs, 10 counted uploads per hub, unlimited members, files up to 5 MB, and custom hub and profile URLs. Growth costs $29.99 per month and includes unlimited hubs and uploads, files up to 5 GB, 100 GB of cloud storage, and priority live chat. Kahana says paid content uses short-lived file links and access checks, but does not guarantee DRM.

Picard.law offers open-source legal AI that runs locally and a managed cloud product for production teams. It analyzes legal documents and answers questions with citations tied to the documents, refusing when supporting evidence is missing. Matter workspaces keep uploaded agreements and diligence packs in shared context. Tabular review extracts information across documents and cites each cell to a page and quote; the open-source version also supports Excel export. Picard OSS runs on one machine with documents stored locally, using BM25 full-text search and CARP retrieval on SQLite FTS5. Picard.law Cloud is managed on Azure and uses Neo4j GraphRAG. The maker describes OSS as suited to legal engineers and air-gap use, while Cloud is aimed at production legal AI teams. OSS is single-user and has no built-in authentication. Its plan costs nothing under AGPL for local development and proof of concept, but users pay model API costs with their own keys. The products are available on the web and self-hosted.