What hardware do I need for 100% local mode?
Comfortable minimum: 16 GB RAM, a recent CPU (4+ cores), 10 GB of disk space for the index.
Recommended: 32 GB RAM and an NVIDIA GPU (8 GB VRAM+) for smooth local LLMs (Mistral 7B, Llama 3 8B). Without a GPU, queries still work but are slower (10-30 s per answer).
On Apple Silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3), Metal is used automatically — no NVIDIA GPU needed.
How many PDFs can RefChat index?
No software limit. In practice, libraries of 5,000 to 20,000 articles are handled without difficulty. Indexing a typical PDF takes 2 to 8 seconds depending on the mode (with or without OCR) and hardware.
For larger volumes (50,000+), the cloud mode or a dedicated on-premise deployment is advisable.
Are Zotero and Mendeley supported?
Yes. RefChat simply points at your Zotero storage folder (storage/) or Mendeley folder. Metadata is automatically enriched via GROBID and OpenAlex. No extension to install on the Zotero side.
Which languages are supported?
The embedding model (multilingual E5-large) covers about a hundred languages. The best-handled languages are French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch. You can ask a question in English on a mixed FR/EN corpus — RefChat finds the relevant passages in both languages.
Is my data really confidential?
Local mode: no data leaves your machine. You can even work offline after installation.
Cloud mode: indexing and LLMs run on our OVHcloud servers (Roubaix, France). Data encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3), deletion on request, no model training on your content. Documented GDPR compliance.
Can I try RefChat before purchase?
Yes. On request we offer a live demo (30 minutes) and a trial on a sample of your own library, under NDA if needed. Request a demo.
What is the difference with ChatGPT, NotebookLM or Perplexity?
RefChat is specialised on scientific libraries (GROBID parsing, EasyOCR OCR, hybrid dense+BM25+reranking search, automatic query-mode detection). Above all: 100% local option — your articles, patents or sensitive reports never leave your machine.
Generalist cloud solutions send your documents to US servers and do not offer the same level of source citation or thematic organisation.
Detailed comparison: RefChat vs NotebookLM.