The honest comparison

Prism vs. Vector vs. Raycast

Three AI-native command palettes, three different bets about what "search your stuff" should mean. Here's who each one is actually for — written by the Prism team, without the usual hit-piece energy.

Short version. Pick Vector if you live inside macOS and want a smarter Spotlight. Pick Raycast if you want a polished Mac launcher with a huge extension ecosystem. Pick Prism if your work sprawls across Notion, Slack, Drive, Obsidian, and a pile of other tools — and you want one hotkey that searches all of them on macOS, Windows, or Linux, without sending your data to the cloud.

Prism

For: knowledge workers, homelabbers, and privacy-minded teams with data spread across 5+ tools.

Vector

For: Apple Silicon Mac users who mostly live in Apple apps and want Spotlight with semantics.

Raycast

For: Mac power users who want a polished launcher, store-grade extensions, and don't mind a subscription or cloud AI.

Side by side

Current as of April 2026. We'll update this page when any of these products ship something material.

Dimension Prism Vector Raycast
Platforms macOS · Windows · Linux macOS 26+ · Apple Silicon macOS · Windows (beta)
AI model Your local LLM (LM Studio, Ollama — any model you want) Two bundled on-device models (fixed) Cloud models (OpenAI / Anthropic) via Raycast Pro
Data sources 17+ native connectors: Notion, Slack, Drive, Obsidian, Paperless, BookStack, n8n, Confluence, Nextcloud, Email, Qdrant, SearXNG, Brave, local files, and more Mac-built-in only: apps, files, iMessage, Calendar, Contacts, Clipboard, Weather, Maps Hundreds of community extensions via the Raycast Store
Privacy model Fully local — nothing leaves your machine On-device ML (but closed source) Cloud AI; extensions vary
Pricing $49 once · lifetime Pay what you want Free · Pro $10/mo · Teams $10/user/mo
Works offline Yes, fully Yes Launcher yes, AI no
Self-hosted service support Native (Paperless, BookStack, n8n, Nextcloud, Obsidian REST…) None Via extensions, limited
Extension ecosystem Connector SDK (growing) None Large, mature store
Stage Beta, active dev Beta, early Mature, v1.x
Prism
One hotkey. Every tool. Any OS. Your LLM.
  • Cross-platform by design. Tauri 2 + Rust core, signed installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Not Mac-only.
  • Bring your own model. Prism talks to LM Studio or Ollama — use Llama, Qwen, a fine-tune, whatever runs on your box. No model lock-in.
  • Searches where you actually work. Notion + Slack + Drive + Obsidian + Paperless + 12 more, in parallel, with unified ranking.
  • One-time purchase. $49 Foundation, keep forever, free updates. No per-seat math.
Honest caveat. Prism is a beta. If you're on macOS and the only thing you want is a faster Spotlight with no configuration, Vector will get you there with less setup. Prism pays off once you have more than one or two tools in your stack.
Vector
A genuinely better Spotlight, for modern Apple Silicon Macs.
  • Native-to-the-bone. Built by an ex-Apple engineer in Swift, ~120MB, Liquid Glass UI, Neural Engine where it helps.
  • On-device ML routing + embeddings. Semantic search over your Mac's built-in data, with zero cloud round-trips.
  • Pay what you want. The friendliest pricing frame in the category.
  • Zero config. Download, run, it indexes your Mac.
Where Vector stops. It can see what macOS exposes — Files, iMessage, Calendar, Contacts, Clipboard, Wikipedia. It can't reach into Notion, Slack, Drive, your self-hosted wiki, your Paperless archive, or anything on Windows or Linux. It's also macOS 26 and Apple Silicon only, and it's closed source — the top comment on its Product Hunt page is a request to open it.
Raycast
The mature Mac launcher with a real extension store.
  • The store is the product. Hundreds of extensions — Linear, GitHub, Jira, Notion, Slack, window management — written and maintained by a large community.
  • Polished every corner. Clipboard history, snippets, window management, calculator, launch, switcher. All tight.
  • Raycast AI. Chat, commands, AI-assisted extensions. Fast and capable.
  • Team features. Shared commands and snippets for orgs.
Tradeoffs. AI runs in Raycast's cloud on OpenAI/Anthropic models — fine for most, a dealbreaker if you need your data to stay local. macOS is the home platform; Windows is in beta; Linux isn't on the roadmap. Subscription pricing scales per seat.

Still the right call for your stack?

Prism is in public beta with a 30-day free trial. If it doesn't earn its hotkey in a week, don't buy it.

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