Quick summary: A private ChatGPT alternative is an AI assistant that runs on a server or workstation your company owns. Staff get the same chat experience, but documents and prompts never leave your network, and the cost does not grow with every question.

Why teams look for an alternative

Public AI chatbots are excellent for general questions. The problem starts when employees paste in contracts, customer lists, source code or financial reports. Depending on the service, plan and settings, that content is processed and may be stored on third-party servers, outside your control. Many companies respond with a blanket ban — and lose the productivity gains along with the risk.

What "private AI" actually means

A private AI assistant runs the language model locally, inside your own infrastructure. Nothing is sent to an external API when someone asks a question. After installation it can even run fully offline (air-gapped), which matters for legal, healthcare, finance, government and manufacturing teams that handle sensitive data.

What you should expect from a serious alternative

Answers grounded in your own documents, with the source cited so people can verify them. Support for real office files: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, scanned paper (OCR) and images. The ability to turn a conversation into a finished Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF file. Permissions, so each department only sees what it should. And a cost model you can plan for.

How DABO AI fits

DABO AI is self-hosted Local AI software installed with one file on Windows, Windows Server, Ubuntu, Red Hat or macOS. The installer detects your GPU and recommends a suitable model from the DABO model family, from DABO-Lite to DABO-Ultra. Every answer comes with sources, and if nothing relevant is found it says so instead of inventing an answer.

The Free plan supports up to 5 users and 100 documents with no time limit: chat over your own documents (including scans), Excel analysis, charts, contracts and quotations in your company templates, and export to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF in 14 languages. Pro, Max and Ultra add more users, voice, workflow automation, CRM/ERP connections, the DABO AI Desktop agent and more.

The cost difference

Public AI services typically charge per seat, per request or per token. DABO AI has a fixed cost per plan, so a heavy month does not create a surprise bill. For repetitive paperwork such as drafting, searching and summarising, teams can cut manual handling time by up to 90%, depending on the workflow.

How to start

Download the Free plan at dabotech.ai/download, install it on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU (16 GB VRAM or more) or a Mac with Apple Silicon, load a folder of real documents and compare the answers with what your team does today.

Frequently asked questions

Is a private AI as good as ChatGPT? For questions about your own documents it is often better, because it answers from your files and cites them. For open-ended general knowledge, a large cloud model may still be broader.

Does it need the Internet? Only during installation. After that it can run completely offline.

Can we try it before buying? Yes. The Free plan has no time limit, and companies that want a managed setup can request a 14-day Pilot.