Open Semantic Desktop Search vs Recoll
Open Semantic Desktop Search
opensemanticsearch.orgRecoll
recoll.orgSide by side
| Figure | Open Semantic Desktop Search | Recoll |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 4 |
| Spec score · Desktop Search Software | 8.5 (#2) | 8.4 (#4) |
| Browser integration | Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera can integrate through the OpenSearch standard. | A Firefox extension can add visited web-page history to the index. |
| Indexing | Documents in configured shared folders begin indexing automatically when the virtual machine starts. | The indexer can run periodically as a batch job or continuously for real-time indexing. |
| Licence | The GitHub repository identifies the project as GPL-3.0 licensed open-source software. | Recoll source is free software distributed under the GPL; a public repository identifies GPL-2.0. |
| Maker | The contact page names Markus Mandalka as the software developer. | Official credits identify Jean-Francois Dockes as the project maintainer and contact. |
| Purpose | Free open-source desktop search software for full-text search, exploratory search, text analytics and text mining across large document sets. | Recoll is desktop full-text search software that finds documents by their contents and file names. |
| What it does | Open Semantic Search is an open-source search and text-analytics platform for large, heterogeneous document collections and news. | Recoll is a desktop full-text search program that searches document contents and filenames. |
Plans
Open Semantic Desktop Search
- Open Semantic Desktop SearchFree
- Open Semantic Desktop SearchFree
- Open Semantic Search ServerPriced on request
Recoll
- LinuxFree
- Recoll (Linux and source)Free
- Recoll for WindowsPriced on request
- Windows binaryPriced 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.
Recoll
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.