Open Semantic Desktop Search vs ProtonSearch
Open Semantic Desktop Search
opensemanticsearch.orgProtonSearch
protonsearch-windows.vercel.appSide by side
| Figure | Open Semantic Desktop Search | ProtonSearch |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 0 |
| Spec score · Desktop Search Software | 8.5 (#2) | 6.9 (#37) |
| Installation | Installation requires importing the appliance into VirtualBox and mapping host document folders as shared folders. | The maker provides a Windows PowerShell installer and a manual installer download through GitHub Releases. |
| Intended users | The desktop virtual machine is described for single users, while the separate server installation is aimed at organizations and research teams. | The maker describes ProtonSearch as made for Windows power users. |
| OCR | Tesseract-based OCR extracts text from scanned documents, screenshots and photographed pages. | It extracts OCR text from screenshots, pictures, and copied clipboard images for searching. |
| Search | Search supports operators including wildcards, Boolean AND/OR/NOT, and fuzzy search. | It searches apps, files, folders, browser history, clipboard, OCR text, Git activity, notes, Steam games, settings, commands, and AI chats. |
| What it does | Open Semantic Search is an open-source search and text-analytics platform for large, heterogeneous document collections and news. | ProtonSearch is a local-first Windows launcher for finding and opening items on a PC from one keyboard shortcut. |
Plans
Open Semantic Desktop Search
- Open Semantic Desktop SearchFree
- Open Semantic Desktop SearchFree
- Open Semantic Search ServerPriced on request
In their own words
Open Semantic Desktop Search
Open Semantic Desktop Search is free, open-source software for full-text and semantic search, text analytics and mining across large document sets. Its desktop edition comes as a virtual machine appliance for import into VirtualBox; configured shared folders point to documents, and indexing starts when the machine launches. Search supports wildcards, Boolean AND/OR/NOT and fuzzy matching. Multilingual semantic search uses a thesaurus to find synonyms, narrower terms and aliases, while stemming helps find other word forms. Interactive facets group metadata such as authors, organizations, people, dates, tags and document types. Previews can display PDFs, extracted text, table rows and images. Analysis tools include date charts, word clouds, word lists, network graphs and interactive maps. OCR can recognize text in images and scanned PDFs. Connectors include files, feeds, websites, SQL databases, MediaWiki and IMAP email. The desktop appliance is for a single user; a separate server installation is aimed at organizations and research teams. The multilingual virtual machine image is a 4 GB download, and the German desktop image is listed as coming soon.
ProtonSearch
ProtonSearch has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.