Hot Open-Source RAG Tool for Document Chat: GraphRAG, Multimodal QA & Complex Reasoning
This article introduces Kotaemon, an open‑source Retrieval‑Augmented Generation platform that lets users chat with their documents, offering a self‑hosted web UI, support for local and API LLMs, hybrid retrieval, multimodal question answering, GraphRAG indexing, and advanced reasoning capabilities, along with step‑by‑step installation via App or Docker.
Core Features
Self‑hosted RAG Web‑UI – multi‑user login, private/public document collections, shareable chat logs.
LLM and embedding model management – supports local LLMs and major API providers (OpenAI, Azure, Ollama, Groq).
Hybrid RAG pipeline – default hybrid (full‑text + vector) retrievers with re‑ranking for higher retrieval quality.
Multimodal QA – parses documents containing charts and tables and answers questions over them.
Advanced citations and PDF preview – provides detailed citations, displays them in an in‑browser PDF viewer with scores and highlights, and warns when retrieved passages have low relevance.
Complex reasoning support – question decomposition for multi‑hop queries; supports agent‑based reasoning methods such as ReAct and ReWOO.
Extensibility – built on Gradio, allowing custom UI elements; supports various indexing and retrieval strategies and includes a GraphRAG indexing pipeline example.
Usage Demonstrations
Typical workflow screenshots illustrate:
Adding an AI model.
Uploading files.
Chatting with documents.
Viewing the information panel with citations and highlights.
Quick Start
Online demo (read‑only):
https://huggingface.co/spaces/cin-model/kotaemon-demo
App Installation
Download the latest release (v0.4.4) from the GitHub releases page.
Extract the downloaded archive.
Navigate to the scripts folder and run the installer matching your OS:
After installation, the installer prompts to launch the UI; confirm.
The UI opens automatically in the default browser.
Docker Deployment
Start the server with:
docker run \
-e GRADIO_SERVER_NAME=0.0.0.0 \
-e GRADIO_SERVER_PORT=7860 \
-p 7860:7860 -it --rm \
taprosoft/kotaemon:v1.0Then open http://localhost:7860/ in a browser to access the built‑in Web UI.
https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon
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