I can't speak for the internals, but I've found it to be dead simple to spin up locally and use, with decent results on the docs I've tested it with.

That said, I think a lot of AI chat services have recognized that document search is table stakes and are building this functionality into their tools, so I don't know whether Kotaemon as a standalone tool will be needed for much longer.

For example, my company was originally going to push out Kotaemon for private document search, but we have now put that on pause because we're exploring whether we can get the same results through our primary AI chat service, without having to point users to a separate tool.