Different philosophies
Khoj is an open-source AI assistant that can search your files, notes, and connected services. Since Khoj Cloud was deprecated in April 2026, it's now self-host only. Powerful and flexible, but you run the infrastructure.
Hjarni is simpler on purpose. A hosted knowledge base. A built-in MCP server. No self-hosting. No Docker. Sign up, write notes, connect your AI. Done.
Assistant versus knowledge base
Khoj is an AI assistant that happens to connect to your data. It searches across files, GitHub repos, Notion pages, and more. The assistant is the product.
Hjarni is a knowledge base that happens to connect to your AI. The notes are the product. Your AI (ChatGPT, Claude, whatever) is something you bring. Different center of gravity.
A concrete workflow
You want your AI to know your project conventions. With Khoj, you'd point it at your files and let it index them. It searches across everything you've connected.
With Hjarni, you'd write a conventions note, put it in a folder with AI instructions ("follow these conventions when helping with this project"), and connect Claude. Claude reads the note and follows the rules. Less automatic. More intentional.
Khoj indexes everything. Hjarni makes you write it down. Both work. The question is which kind of memory you trust more.
When a hosted plan goes away
This is the sharpest reason people reconsidered Khoj this year. In April 2026 Khoj retired its hosted Cloud, leaving self-hosting the open-source server as the only way to keep using it. If self-hosting was the very thing you were paying to avoid, that is a hard landing. The product you relied on suddenly needs a machine, Docker, and an indexing pipeline you never signed up to maintain.
Hjarni is a small hosted product too, so the honest promise is not that it will never change. It is that you are never trapped. Your notes are plain Markdown, and the whole knowledge base is readable over a REST API and the built-in MCP server, so you can pull every note out whole and take it elsewhere. The case is not that Hjarni is permanent. It is that leaving, if you ever need to, costs you nothing but the export.
When Khoj is the better fit
If you want to self-host, search across multiple data sources, or need an open-source solution you can audit and extend, Khoj is a strong choice. You'll need to run your own server (Khoj Cloud shut down in April 2026), but if you're technical, that's the point.
When people choose Hjarni instead
The case for Hjarni is simplicity. No servers to maintain. No Docker. No indexing pipelines. Write notes. Connect your AI. Share with your team.
Folder-level AI instructions also set Hjarni apart. You're not just giving your AI access to data. You're telling it how to behave with different kinds of knowledge.