The Best Local AI File Search Apps for Mac in 2026

Local AI file search means two things at once: the tool matches files by *meaning* rather than by filename, and the models doing that matching run on your own hardware rather than in someone else's data centre. Six tools on the Mac fit some version of that description in 2026, and they are not interchangeable — they index different things, they cost between nothing and $29.99 a month, and two of the most popular ones are only local if you configure them to be.

The short answer: for searching the files already on your disk, Dhito is the pick at $4.99/month — the cheapest of the purpose-built options, the only one that indexes transcripts at segment level so a search lands on the minute inside a recording rather than on the file, and one of only two here that is fully local out of the box with nothing to configure. Fenn at $9/month is the alternative, and it wins outright if your work lives in spreadsheets, slide decks or iWork, because Dhito does not index those.

We make Dhito, which you should factor in. So the criteria are stated before the ranking rather than after it, every price and capability below was checked against each product's own site or documentation in August 2026, and where a competitor wins it is said plainly rather than buried.

How these are judged

Four criteria, applied in this order, because they are the ones that decide whether a tool solves the problem people actually have:

1. Does it search the files already on your disk? Not a folder you curate for it — the mess as it exists. Two of the six fail this and are ranked below the ones that do not. 2. Does it see inside images, audio and video? This is where the built-in tools give up entirely, and it is the largest single capability difference in the category. 3. Is it local without being configured to be? "Supports local models" and "has no cloud path" are different claims, and only the second survives someone never opening the settings. 4. What does it cost? Prices here span 6× for products doing broadly the same job.

The comparison

The two columns that decide most choices are media contents and local by default. Almost everything here can search a PDF. Far fewer can tell you which minute of a two-hour recording the budget came up in, and fewer still do it without a network round trip you did not ask for.

1. Dhito — the pick for searching your own disk

Meets all four criteria. Searches your existing folders, sees inside images, audio and video, is local with nothing to configure — there is no model provider to choose and no cloud path to switch off — and is the cheapest purpose-built option at $4.99/month.

Best for: people whose problem is *"I know I have this, I just cannot remember what I called it"*, across a mixed pile of documents, screenshots and recordings.

Dhito indexes the folders you point it at, in place. Text goes through a local embedding model; images go through a local vision model that captions and OCRs them; audio and video go through Whisper on-device and the transcript is indexed at segment level, so a search lands on the minute rather than the file. Video gets a second pass most tools skip: frames are sampled through each segment, captioned and OCR'd against their timestamp, so a slide or a chart that appeared on screen is findable even if nobody said it aloud. You can then ask a question of a document and get an answer with the page cited, from a model running on the Neural Engine.

Your files never leave the machine, and nothing about them is collected. Not the contents, not the filenames, not your search queries, not usage telemetry. The index is a local database on your own disk. There is no upload step, no sync, no account to create, and no server-side copy of anything — because there is no server in the search path at all. The only network traffic the app makes is licence validation, which sends a hardware ID and your billing email and nothing else. That is a stronger claim than "processes locally," which most tools in this category can also say while still holding your data somewhere.

• Pricing: $4.99/month after a 14-day trial that needs no account and no card. Billed month to month, cancel whenever — there is no annual commitment, which is what makes it the cheapest way into this category rather than just the cheapest sticker price.
• Models: Whisper (speech), Florence-2 (vision), BGE-small-en-v1.5 (embeddings), an MS-MARCO cross-encoder (reranking), Qwen3 (chat). All bundled, all on-device.
• Where it loses: Apple Silicon only — there is no Intel build and no plan for one. The gap in the format list is spreadsheets and slides: no Excel, no PowerPoint, no Pages, Keynote or Numbers, and no InDesign. Everything else is broader than the marketing suggests — over 100 extensions in all: PDF, Word, RTF, ODT and EPUB, text, Markdown and RST, CSV and TSV, and around 33 code and config formats, plus 17 video and 14 audio containers — but if your work lives in decks and spreadsheets, that gap decides it. No connectors, so Notion, Apple Notes and Mail are invisible. No sync between Macs, no iOS app, no lifetime licence, and the first index of a large library takes hours.

2. Fenn — the widest coverage, at nearly twice the price

Meets all four criteria, and beats Dhito on breadth. The only reason it is second rather than first is price: $9/month against $4.99, or $108 a year against $60, for the same category of tool. If your formats are on its list and not on Dhito's, that ordering reverses immediately.

Best for: people whose files are not all PDFs — consultants living in Keynote, designers working in InDesign and Illustrator.

Fenn is the closest thing to a direct competitor, and on breadth it is ahead. It advertises 50+ file types including Microsoft Office, Apple iWork, InDesign and Illustrator, plus connectors for Apple Notes, Mail, Notion, Bear and Craft. It transcribes audio and video, reads images, renames files by content, and has rule-based folders that organise as files arrive.

• Pricing: $9/month billed annually, so getting in costs $108 up front rather than a month at a time; alternatively a $249 lifetime licence including a year of updates, or $999 for five Macs. Prices checked August 2026.
• Where it loses: roughly twice Dhito's monthly cost, Apple Silicon only like Dhito, and a broader feature set means a longer learning curve than a search box.

There is a full Dhito and Fenn comparison if you are choosing between exactly these two.

3. Elephas — an assistant first, a search index second

Fails criterion 3, and is the most expensive here. Fully offline operation sits on the $29.99/month tier — six times Dhito's price for the local guarantee Dhito gives by default.

Best for: people who want AI writing help in every Mac app and a searchable knowledge base as part of the same subscription.

Elephas's "Super Brain" builds searchable AI brains from documents, notes and recordings across 20+ formats, including Notion and Obsidian, with citations back to the source. It also does the things a general assistant does — rewriting, summarising, working inside whatever app you are in.

• Pricing: $19.99/month for Professional, $29.99/month for Pro+ which adds offline AI and the full redaction inspector.
• Where it loses: this is not primarily a local tool. It supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Groq alongside local models and Ollama, and the cloud providers are the default path. Fully offline operation sits on the more expensive tier. If you came here for privacy, read the configuration carefully — and note that at $19.99 it is four times Dhito's price, because you are buying an assistant, not a search index.

4. Khoj — open source, if you will run a server

Fails criterion 2, and criterion 1 in practice. It does not index media contents, and it is oriented toward notes and documents you connect rather than a disk full of screenshots and recordings.

Best for: people who self-host by preference and want to own the whole stack.

Khoj is AGPL-3.0, self-hostable on macOS, Linux, Windows or Docker, and searches notes and documents alongside online sources with an AI chat layer on top. It is genuinely free to self-host, and the project has been clear that it always will be.

• Pricing: free self-hosted; a managed cloud app and paid plans exist for people who would rather not run it.
• Where it loses: it is infrastructure, not an app you install and forget. You are running a service, keeping it updated, and choosing models. It is oriented toward notes and documents rather than a messy disk full of screenshots and recordings, and it does not index media contents. For a large share of Mac users, "set up Docker" is where the evaluation ends — which is a statement about the audience, not a criticism of the software.

5. AnythingLLM — free, but it does not search your disk

Fails criteria 1 and 2. You add documents to a workspace by hand; it will not find a file you forgot existed, which is the entire problem this category is named after. Ranked here on merit as a document-chat tool, which it is very good at.

Best for: people who want to chat with a curated document set and choose which model does it.

AnythingLLM Desktop is free, installs in one click, needs no account, and bundles a vector database and embedder so RAG works out of the box. Workspaces keep document sets separate, each with its own model and chat history, and it ingests PDFs, DOCX, transcripts, YouTube, GitHub repos and arbitrary URLs.

• Pricing: free for the desktop app.
• Where it loses: it is a document chat tool, not a file search engine. You add documents to a workspace deliberately; it does not index your disk and it will not find a file you forgot existed. That is a different job from the one this roundup is about. It is also local only if you select a local model — the cloud providers are right there in the setup.

6. Spotlight and Apple Intelligence — free, installed, and not in this category

Fails criteria 1 and 2 on the definition. It searches your disk, but lexically, not by meaning — and it does not index media contents. It is listed because it is the tool everyone already has, and because it is genuinely the right answer for a large number of people.

Best for: everyone, for launching apps and opening files they can name.

macOS 26 Tahoe gave Spotlight its largest upgrade ever: better ranking, filters by type and app, quick actions, clipboard history. It is fast, free, and already running.

• Where it loses: the matching is still lexical. Search *"client contract signature terms"* and Agreement_Acme_Corp_2026.pdf does not come back, because the strings do not overlap. Loose screenshots outside the Photos library are matched on filename. Audio and video contents are not indexed at all. And Spotlight Suggestions sends what you type to Apple unless you turn it off under System Settings → Spotlight → Search results.

There is a longer Dhito and Spotlight comparison, and a broader roundup of Spotlight alternatives covering launchers and deep-search utilities as well.

Who should use what

• You want to search the disk you already have: Dhito, at $4.99/month. It is the cheapest tool that meets all four criteria, and the only one that puts you at the moment inside a recording rather than at the file.
• Your work lives in Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages or Numbers, or in Notion: Fenn. Dhito does not index those, and no amount of price advantage changes that.
• You want a writing assistant more than a search index: Elephas — accepting that the default configuration is cloud and that the offline tier is $29.99/month.
• You self-host on principle: Khoj.
• You want to chat with a specific document set on a model you chose: AnythingLLM, free — but understand that it does not search your disk.
• You are on an Intel Mac: none of the AI tools here run. Worth knowing that macOS 26 Tahoe is the last macOS to support Intel Macs at all, so this is a platform that is ending rather than one waiting for software.
• Your searches already succeed: Spotlight. There is nothing to fix, and a second index costs you disk and hours for no gain.

How to evaluate these on your own files

Semantic search quality is not a specification you can read off a page — it depends on your documents, your vocabulary, and how you phrase things. Two hours of testing will tell you more than any roundup, including this one.

1. Write down five real failures. The exact searches that came back empty in Spotlight. Not hypothetical ones — the ones that actually cost you time this month. 2. Point each candidate at the same folder. A folder with a genuine mix: PDFs, screenshots, at least one recording. 3. Wait for the index to finish. Judging a half-built index is the most common evaluation mistake, and it usually punishes the tool doing the most work. 4. Run your five queries against each. Count how many surface the right file in the top three results. 5. Check the format list against your own disk. This is the one thing that can rule a tool out regardless of how good its retrieval is.

Every tool here except Khoj has a free trial or a free tier, so this costs you time and nothing else.

A note on what "local" means

Three of the six tools here can run entirely on your machine but do not by default. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it does. "Supports local models" and "has no cloud path" are different claims, and only the second one holds when someone misconfigures it, when a default changes in an update, or when a feature you have not audited quietly calls out.

If you are choosing a tool because the files are confidential — client documents, medical records, unreleased work — the question to ask is not *can it run locally* but *what happens if I never open the settings*. For work that is subject to GDPR or HIPAA, that is the difference between a control and an intention.