Description

Category: Learning & Knowledge Management

#local-ai #privacy-first #vault-search #llm-integration

The Private AI Chat plugin enables secure, local AI-powered conversations with your notes using a privacy-first approach. It connects to a locally running LM Studio server, ensuring that all processing happens on your own device without sending data to external services. You can query your vault naturally, with the plugin automatically searching relevant notes and citing them in responses. It allows narrowing the AI's focus to specific open notes for targeted insights and supports performance tuning through adjustable models, search parameters, and token limits. Cross-platform compatibility for Mac and Windows makes it widely accessible, while easy setup and model swapping simplify usage.

Reviews

Milica Bogdanovic
Reviewed on Apr 6th, 2026
Great plugin! Switched to this from Co***t plugin after having many problems with context window of a lot of models. Somehow in Private AI everything worked so far, without errors. It seems to be very fast. My only desire is that the developer would implement automatic note creation from a conversation - it would be most useful!
Lewy
Reviewed on Mar 23rd, 2026
Works great and using the latest version of llama
Jonathan Micklos
Reviewed on Mar 3rd, 2026
This is a great plugin to have to locally make sense of my second Brain without all the risk/overhead of a remote model! Thanks for putting this out there!!!!
Gizmo Bot
Reviewed on Mar 2nd, 2026
I hooked it up and in about two minutes and it just... works. It’s wild being able to actually chat with my vault.
Brick
Reviewed on Feb 24th, 2026
No review text provided.
Stefan Lafloer
Reviewed on Feb 23rd, 2026
one of the best AI plugins for Obsidian. RAG indexing works great. Using it with local LM Studio server and Gemma3-4b perfectly!!
Van
Reviewed on Feb 23rd, 2026
This plugin is a lifesaver. I love how it keeps all my notes private and how easy it is to set up. I have tons of personal notes, thoughts, and plans in Obsidian already. And I was looking for a way to unlock their power using AI. Private AI helps me find my notes, chat with them, and synthesize new ideas. This works so well that I'm migrating all my notes elsewhere into Obsidian even faster now. My notes are finally useful, and private! Big thanks to the dev!
Gabe Brown
Reviewed on Feb 23rd, 2026
I use it everyday, it's awesome, and private.

Stats

stars

4,500

downloads

forks

285

days

total PRs

open PRs

closed PRs

merged PRs

total issues

open issues

closed issues

commits

RequirementsExperimental

LM Studio installed and running locally

Latest Version

1.0.64

2 months ago

Changelog

test: add MigrationRunner unit tests (#54),
🔒 fix: verify absence of XSS vulnerabilities in RAG progress code (#51),
test: add tests for EmbeddingService (#49),
Verify image file obsolescence fix in RAGService (#34),
fix: add logging to empty catch block in MigrationRunner (#40),
refactor(db): use error logging for WAL mode setup failures (#42),
feat: add comprehensive unit tests for LoggingUtility (#46),
Add GitHub Action to run tests on PR and merge to main (#47),
ci: add CodeQL vulnerability scanning workflow (#48),
🧹 improve code health by enhancing error logging (#45),
🧹 fix(db): add error logging to empty catch block in UnifiedVectorDatabase (#44),
perf: optimize deduplication of search results in ChatView (#35)

See all version on GitHub

README file from

Github

Private AI Chat for Obsidian

Your most sensitive notes, your private thoughts — other AI plugins send them to someone's servers. Private AI doesn't.

✅ Your notes stay on your device
✅ Use local LLMs like gpt-oss, Qwen3, Gemma4, DeepSeek, Mistral and many more, locally on your own hardware
✅ No data is transmitted to external services
✅ No analytics or tracking

Compatible With: LM Studio

Getting Started + Setup

Goto Community Plugins
Search Private AI and click Install
Click Enable

Enjoy!

Features

Easy Setup: Easy setup and model swapping with LM Studio
Cross Platform: Supports for most modern Mac and Windows machines
Integrated Vault Search: Automatically search your Obsidian vault for relevant information to provide contextual responses and cite specific notes from your vault
Open Tab Context: Focus your conversation on specific notes for focused insights
Performance Tuning: Customize models, search parameters, token limits, and more to tune performance for your hardware

Easy and powerful configuration

Example Queries

"I have to have a difficult conversation with a friend, read my journal entry about the situation and help me come up with a good way to talk to my friend compassionately"
"My partner was a jerk to me, help me look at other alternative reasons why they may have reacted the way they did"
"Talk to this journal entry like a good friend"
"When did I first meet Jacob?"
"What did frank talk about at our meeting on Obsidian plugins?"
"What did I write about machine learning?"
"What are my thoughts on productivity systems?"

Development

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues and pull requests.

Attributions

This project respects and is compatible with the original licenses of all code and dependencies used:

Development Tools

esbuild - MIT License - Used for bundling the plugin
TypeScript - Apache-2.0 License - Used for type safety
Obsidian API - MIT License - Official Obsidian plugin API

Dependencies

All development dependencies are used under their respective open-source licenses (MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD) and are properly externalized in the build process.