Antfly: one AI database that replaces 9 separate tools

Building an AI-powered search system today usually means duct-taping together a dozen different tools: a regular database, a search engine, a vector database (a special database that understands meaning, not just keywords), a graph database, an AI model API, and more. Antfly just launched to replace all of them with a single install.

It's an open-source AI database that handles text, images, audio, and video search — plus built-in AI chat, knowledge graphs (visual maps showing how information connects), and document processing. One tool. Zero glue code.

9 Tools Collapsed Into 1

Here's what Antfly replaces, according to its creators:

How It Actually Works

Hybrid search is the headline feature. When you search for something, Antfly runs three different search methods simultaneously:

• BM25 — traditional keyword matching (like Google circa 2005)
• Dense vectors — AI-powered meaning search (finds results even when the exact words don't match)
• Sparse vectors (SPLADE) — a middle ground that catches important terms AI might miss

It then combines all three results using a technique called Reciprocal Rank Fusion — basically, if multiple search methods agree something is relevant, it ranks higher. The result: noticeably better search quality than any single method alone.

AI Chat That Actually Knows Your Data

Antfly includes built-in RAG agents (Retrieval-Augmented Generation — a technique where the AI first searches your documents, then answers questions based on what it found). This means you can upload your company's documents and have a conversation with an AI that gives answers grounded in your actual data, not internet hallucinations.

The RAG system supports streaming responses, multi-turn conversations, tool integration, and even confidence scores so you know how sure the AI is about its answer.

Search Photos, Audio, and Video — Not Just Text

Drop in a photo and search for similar images. Upload audio files and find matching content. Antfly uses CLIP (an AI model that understands both images and text) and CLAP (the audio equivalent) to enable cross-modal search — meaning you can type a text query and get image or audio results back.

Your Data Stays On Your Machine

Antfly ships with Termite, a companion tool that runs AI models locally using efficient ONNX format. Embeddings (the AI calculations that make smart search possible), text chunking, and reranking all happen on your hardware. No data leaves your network.

Try It In 30 Seconds

# Install and run with Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/antflydb/antfly:omni

# Or with Go
go run ./cmd/antfly swarm

Once running, open localhost:8080 to access the Antfarm dashboard — a web interface with playgrounds for search, AI chat, knowledge graphs, embeddings, OCR (reading text from images), and audio transcription.

It Even Works Inside PostgreSQL

For teams already using PostgreSQL, Antfly offers a pgaf extension that brings its search capabilities directly into your existing database:

-- Add Antfly search to any PostgreSQL table
CREATE INDEX idx_content ON docs USING antfly (content);
SELECT * FROM docs WHERE content @@@ 'search query';

Who This Is For

Startup developers — stop spending weeks integrating 9 different services before you can ship a search feature. Data teams — index documents, images, and audio in one place instead of maintaining separate pipelines. Anyone building AI apps — the built-in RAG means you can go from zero to "AI chatbot that knows my data" in an afternoon.

Antfly just hit Hacker News with 97 points and climbing. The core server uses the Elastic License 2.0 (free to use and self-host), while all SDKs are Apache 2.0 (fully open). SDKs available for Go, Python, TypeScript, and React.

Full source and docs at github.com/antflydb/antfly.

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