Introduction

Companion Intelligence is a local-first platform for running your own apps, AI, and memory infrastructure on hardware that you own.

Companion Servers are designed to deliver a top-tier personal inference experience at a reasonable price, but our software suite is designed to work on most PCs (Linux, Windows, Mac), all accessible via Companion Hub: an open-source personal server platform that installs and manages self-hosted apps through a web dashboard, desktop app, and CLI.

This documentation site covers the broader ecosystem of Companion Intelligence:

Companion Hub: the local app runtime and dashboard
Companion Portal: remote access, device pairing, and public access flows
First-party apps: Companion Intelligence apps that work on Hub and with Companion Memory

Start with Installation if you want to run Hub now. Read on if you want the product map first.

Why Companion Hub?

Digital sovereignty: run your apps, data, and AI on your own hardware
Privacy by default: local-first architecture with optional cloud features
One dashboard: install apps, manage updates, check logs, and configure networking
Integrated AI: local Ollama support, cloud fallback, and standardized inference settings for apps
Managed remote access: Tailscale and Cloudflare Gateway without manual port-forwarding
A bigger ecosystem: Hub is the foundation for Portal, first-party apps, and third-party and community apps

How the platform fits together


Capture → Portal / Gateway → Companion Memory ← Hub (app runtime) ← Companion App Store
                                  ↕
                           Clients / XR / Devices

In practical terms:

Hub runs apps and local services on your machine
Portal is the optional remote control plane
Companion App Store is where installable apps are published
First-party, third-party, and community apps are the user-facing tools built on top of that stack

Companion Hub itself runs on Docker. Each app is an isolated compose stack with automatic reverse proxy (Traefik), local hostnames, and optional remote exposure.

You can run Hub via the desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux), the cihub CLI (servers and SSH), or cihub up prod --detached for headless appliance-style startup.