Stella Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Stella is a free, fully local semantic search app for your Mac. It finds files by what they mean, not what they are named, and it runs entirely on your machine with no cloud and no account. Verdict: a genuinely useful privacy-first tool that is still early. Best for Mac users drowning in documents. Price: free. Rating: 7/10.

What is Stella?

Spotlight is fine until you forget what you named a file. Then it is useless. Stella exists for that exact moment. It is a semantic search tool for macOS that understands the content and meaning of your documents, so you can search “Q3 revenue report” and find the right file even if you saved it as “final_v4_REAL.pdf” two years ago.

The product launched on Product Hunt in mid-2026, built by a group of engineers out of Waterloo, and it is currently a v1.0.0 beta. What makes it stand out is not just the meaning-based search. It is that everything happens on your device. Stella runs local AI models to index your PDFs, notes, documents, and spreadsheets. No cloud, no telemetry, no account. For anyone who handles client files, legal documents, or anything sensitive, that local-first design is the whole pitch.

What are Stella’s key features?

Semantic search that understands meaning

This is the core. Stella reads your documents and indexes what they are actually about, not just their filenames or basic metadata. You describe what you are looking for in plain language and it surfaces the file based on the concepts inside it. In practice this means you can find a contract by describing its terms, or locate a report by the topic it covers, even when you cannot remember a single word of the title. For people with thousands of files, this is the feature that justifies the download.

Fully local and private

Everything runs on your machine. The AI models that power the search are downloaded and run on-device, which is why the install is a hefty 1.5 GB. Nothing leaves your computer, not even temporarily, and there is no account to create. In a market where most “AI search” tools quietly ship your documents to a server, Stella going fully offline is a real differentiator and the main reason a privacy-conscious user would pick it.

Folder-based indexing you control

You choose which directories Stella indexes rather than handing it your entire drive. That keeps the index focused and fast, and it means you can point it at your work folders without it crawling your whole system. It is a small design choice but a sensible one, and it respects that you might not want every file on your Mac swept into a search index.

How much does Stella cost?

Stella is completely free. No subscription, no freemium tiers, no account required. You download it, point it at your folders, and use it. That is rare in this category, where on-device AI search tools usually charge a one-time fee or a monthly subscription.

The trade-off is that “free and from a small team” comes with the usual caveats. There is no paid support tier, no enterprise contract, and no guarantee about the roadmap. Compared to a tool like HoudahSpot at around $34 one-time, or Raycast’s paid tiers, Stella costs nothing, but you are also trusting a beta from a young team. For a free download with no account, that is a fair deal. Just go in knowing it is early.

Who is Stella best for?

Use Stella if you are on an Apple Silicon Mac, you deal with a large pile of documents, and you care about privacy. Researchers, lawyers, consultants, and anyone with years of accumulated PDFs will get the most obvious value. If you have ever lost an hour hunting for a file you know exists, this is built for you.

Skip Stella if you are on an Intel Mac or Windows, because it requires Apple Silicon and the Windows version is still listed as coming soon. Skip it too if you need polished, production-grade reliability today. It is a beta, and the 1.5 GB footprint plus local indexing means it asks for real disk space and processing up front. If you live in cloud storage and rarely search local files, it solves a problem you do not have.

Best Stella alternatives

Spotlight is built into macOS and free. It is fast and fine for filename and basic content search, but it does not understand meaning the way Stella does. It is the default you are trying to escape.

HoudahSpot is a power-user file search tool at roughly $34 one-time. It gives you granular, attribute-based search and is more mature than Stella, but it is keyword and metadata driven rather than semantic.

Raycast bundles file search into a broader launcher and productivity tool, with a free plan and paid tiers. It is the better pick if you want one app for search, snippets, and shortcuts rather than a dedicated semantic search engine.

Final verdict: Is Stella worth it?

Stella does one thing and does it in a way the built-in tools cannot match. Searching your files by meaning, fully offline, with no account and no cost, is a genuinely good idea executed with the right priorities. The privacy-first design is not a marketing line here. It is the actual architecture, and that earns trust in a category full of tools that quietly upload your data.

The honest caveats are that it is a beta, it is Mac and Apple Silicon only for now, and it comes from a small team with no paid support. None of that is a dealbreaker for a free tool that asks nothing of you but disk space. Download it, point it at your messiest folder, and see if it finds the thing you have been losing. For most document-heavy Mac users, it will, and that makes it worth keeping around while the team builds it out.