Bring your own content
Bibles in Zefania or OSIS, concordances and lexicons, Bible dictionaries, verse-by-verse commentaries, PDF and EPUB books, audio, and quotes. One search covers the lot.
Coming soon
Bibliup
Your library. Searchable. Word for word.
A free Bible study tool you host yourself. Bring your own Bibles, commentaries, books, sermons and quotes, and Bibliup makes the whole shelf searchable from one place.
- Self-hosted with Docker
- Verbatim sources
- Every answer cited*
- Works offline
- Free software, AGPL v3
- Bibles
- Concordances
- Lexicons
- Bible dictionaries
- Commentaries
- PDF books
- EPUB books
- Sermon audio
- Quotes
- Your notes
- Bookmarks
- Highlights
01 · Your library
Bring your own everything
Nothing comes bundled, and nothing is on an approved list. Drop a file in and Bibliup starts reading it there and then, with progress you can watch and no restart.
Drop it in, it is in
Files stream straight to disk as they arrive, so a four-gigabyte scanned commentary goes in as easily as a one-page quote file.
- Restart it halfway through a 31,000-verse Bible and it picks up where it stopped
- No converting first: it reads the Zefania, OSIS, PDF, EPUB or audio file you already have
- If a drive goes missing, your library stays put rather than emptying itself
- An update that changes how something was indexed repairs your library in place, rather than asking you to add it all over again
A library you manage
Rename, re-index or remove any source. Delete the file and it drops out of the library on its own.
Verbatim and yours
Source text is stored and given back word for word, every result is a citation you can open, and the whole thing runs on hardware you own.
02 · Search and read
One query, every source
Two searches run at once: one for the words you typed, one for what you meant. Ask about welcoming a stranger and the passages that say it another way come back too.
Two searches, one ranking
Bibliup runs both and merges the two lists into one, so a half-remembered phrase still lands and a passage that puts it differently still turns up.
- Type Romans 12:13 and you get Romans 12:13, looked up rather than ranked
- Ask for Psalm 23, 121 and 139 and you get all three, not the stretch between them
- Anything an answer can be built from, you can find yourself in the search box
The panel follows the verse you pick
Tap a verse and the panel beside it is all about that verse. Move to the next one and the panel follows, still on the tab you were reading, so you can walk a chapter a verse at a time.
- A reference in the panel previews in the Bible you already have open, and opens in it
- Explanations and devotionals come from your own library and cite it, like every other answer*
- Written once and kept, so coming back to the same verse is instant
Two people, one note
Share a note with someone on the same Bibliup and you can both write in it at once. Their cursor shows where they are, with their name on it, and neither of you overwrites the other.
- See who else is in the note, and be told plainly if live editing cannot get through
- With no connection it is still yours to write in, and it catches up when you are back
Everything in one list
One query covers every kind of source at once, your own notes included, so a commentary, a sermon and a verse can sit side by side in the same results. A book tells you which page you are on, even where it never had printed ones, and opens at the paragraph that cited what you asked about.
Read in context
Open any verse in its full chapter and read straight through. Switch translations, and follow cross-references and word definitions without leaving the page.
Everything on one verse
Pick a verse and a panel answers on that verse alone: its cross-references, what your dictionaries and commentaries say, the quotes, book passages and talks that cite it, your own notes, and the verse in each of your Bibles side by side.
Listen and read along
Drop in a sermon and it is transcribed on your own machine, timestamped and searchable. A result takes you to the moment it is spoken, to read along as you listen.
One vault, one door
Your notes, the passages you save, the notes other people let you into and the pictures you keep all sit behind it, filed in folders you colour yourself. Those colours show on the verses themselves, so something you put away is easy to spot on the page.
Share a note, not your notes
You choose the note, the person, and whether they may write in it. It turns up in their shared list with your highlights on it, and nothing else of yours is theirs to see.
03 · Ask
Answers that cite, or say they cannot
Answers are built only from what Bibliup found in your library, with every source numbered underneath. When your library does not cover the question, it says so rather than guessing.
Grounded, or honest
The model chooses what to look up. It never chooses what the text says. Every quotation comes from the sources listed under the answer, and every citation points at something Bibliup really retrieved.*
- Search itself writes nothing, so there is nothing for it to invent
- Watch every step as it happens, timed
- Pick the depth per question: one quick pass, or several rounds that weigh each source first
- Choose which steps it reasons through before replying, and how long it may spend
Write a skill of your own
A skill is a way of answering. Sixteen come with Bibliup, and yours takes three boxes: a name, when to use it, and how to answer. From then on Bibliup reaches for it on the questions you described, exactly as it reaches for its own.
- Let yours stand in for one of Bibliup's, in chat and in the study tabs
- Tell it what to lean on: twice as many commentaries, half as many, or none at all
- It answers from your library and cites what it used, like every other skill*
- Or ask for the assistant's own words, which quote and cite nothing and say so
- Yours is a small text file you can keep, send on, or paste into another Bibliup
Close the tab, keep the answer
An answer already being written runs to the end whether you are watching or not. Lose the connection or shut the tab, and reopening the chat picks it back up.
A skill for every kind of question
Ask in your own words and Bibliup reaches for the skill that fits: an explanation, a devotional, notes to teach from. What you asked for always wins. Or turn the choosing off and get the plain answer every time.
- Explanation
- Devotional
- Summary
- Cross-references
- Word study
- Context
- Positions
- Teaching prep
- Prayer
- Quotes
- Comparison
- Objects
- Image
Ask out loud
The same grounded chat sits behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you can wire it into Home Assistant or anything else that speaks it. Spoken answers are phrased to be read aloud, references and all.
Bring your own assistant
Bibliup speaks MCP, so an assistant like Claude can search your Bibles, commentaries and lexicons itself and answer from what it finds there. Or it can put the question to Bibliup and hand you back this install's own answer, with the sources it rests on.*
04 · Make
A verse worth putting on a wall
Ask for a picture and Bibliup paints one inside the stack you brought up yourself, around a passage it has really looked up. The passage is cited under the picture, so nothing about it has to be taken on trust.
Say how it should look, or say nothing
Every dial is yours: what it is drawn in, the hour of the day, the colours, the typeface, whether foliage runs round the edge. Touch none of them and Bibliup decides, and decides differently the next time you ask.
- Backgrounds from a photograph to a woodcut to gold leaf, grouped so you can find one
- Describe a look however you like instead, and the picker says that yours is the one in force
- It opens on whatever you last made a picture with, unless a skill of yours says otherwise
- Square for a card, tall for a phone, wide for a screen, as large as your graphics card manages
Who letters the verse is your choice
Overlaid means Bibliup sets the type itself, out of the text your own Bible carries, so a wrong letter is not unlikely but impossible. Hand the lettering to the image model and it can lose a word, which is why the control tells you underneath before you ever press Create.
- Every mode that could let a model write them warns you underneath, Any included
- Overlaid has no such line, because there is nothing about it to caution anybody over
- Past about a dozen words the wording gets firmer, and it never once refuses to go ahead
- Change Bible afterwards and an overlaid verse is drawn again rather than left as it was
Kept where the rest of yours is
Keep one and it lands in your vault under a name you give it, filed in the folders your notes and bookmarks already use, on every device you sign in from. Or leave it in the chat and it stays with the answer it came from.
Nothing is sent anywhere
The engine that answers your questions draws the picture as well, on hardware you can put a hand on. You switch it on and choose the model yourself, and no outside service is handed the verse or told anything you typed.
Or a picture with no writing on it
Ask about a theme instead of a passage and nothing quotable is drawn at all, which leaves nothing that could come out wrong. That is a request in its own right here, not a picture with a piece missing.
Your assistant can ask for one
Something wired in over MCP can request a picture and get the file straight back, wordless and kept nowhere, as often per hour as the install allows rather than as often as it likes.
05 · Foundations
The parts nobody demos
Offline, in your language, on any device, in whatever colours you like. Your data ready to take or delete, and a running system that explains itself.
Keep working with the wifi off
Install it like an app and download Bibles to read and compare with nothing connected. Notes stay editable, wait on the device, and sync the moment you are back.
- A change on your phone reaches your laptop without either one being reloaded
- Something you deleted stays deleted, even if the other device was offline at the time
Colours you choose, light and dark together
Fifteen themes come with Bibliup, and each is a pair: light colours and dark colours. You pick the look once and light or dark once, so no theme is off limits because of how your phone is set.
- Or make your own: every colour in the app is a row you can change
- The app repaints as you drag, and says so when a pairing gets too faint to read
- A theme is plain JSON you can read, keep in a file, or hand to a friend
- Your themes follow you to your other devices, and each device picks its own
The Bible's own text has its own size
Make scripture bigger without the buttons and menus growing with it. Read a chapter as separate lines or as flowing prose. Twenty-nine typefaces come with Bibliup, one drawn for dyslexia and one for low vision, all served from your own machine.
- Full-screen when you want nothing else on the glass
- Bibliup offers to pick up where you left off, in every Bible, book and talk
Offline, or told why not
Reading offline needs the app itself to open with no signal, which takes an https address the device trusts. Where it can tell, Bibliup says so beside the download rather than leaving you to find out when you need it.
Ready for any language
Every label, date and number goes through a translation catalog, so a new language is one file. Right-to-left layouts, plural rules and local date formats follow on their own. Which languages a passage may be NAMED in is a separate setting again, so a reference you type in yours is understood whatever the app is showing.
Accessible to everyone
Built to WCAG 2.2 AA: full keyboard control, visible focus, screen-reader landmarks and live status. Contrast is measured in every theme that ships, light half and dark half, and nothing important hides behind a hover.
What you can recolour
The colour each part of the Bible is written in, the highlight behind a verse, the mark on a word you searched for, the page, the cards, the accent: all of them are yours to set.
See what it is doing
Structured logs, Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry traces export to your own collector, so indexing, search and chat turn up on the dashboards you already run.
A documented API
Every endpoint the app itself calls is versioned and checked against a published schema, and that same schema writes the OpenAPI 3.1 reference.
Decide who reaches what
Sign in through your own provider and Bibliup handles the rest: make someone an administrator, or give them only the collections they should reach. Everyone's notes, bookmarks and chats stay their own, and deleting an account takes them with it. Or leave sign-in off and share one local account.
Take your data, or delete it
Settings lists everything Bibliup has stored for you, kind by kind, with a count beside each: notes, bookmarks, folders, chats, reading history, themes, skills and the rest. Download any kind to keep, or delete it, on this device and every other one. Your account and what you added to the library are left alone.
Prints as content, not as a screenshot
A chapter, a note, a cited answer: paper gets the content with the app's own furniture gone, a panel that scrolls on screen printed whole rather than one screenful of it, and your dark colours turned back into ink.
Yours to keep, run and change
Bibliup ships under the AGPL, version 3. Every licence it leans on travels with it and is listed in Settings, down to the runtimes beneath each one, and if you change Bibliup and let other people reach your copy, it offers them your source rather than ours.
An empty answer is a claim too
Finding nothing and failing to look are two different answers, and Bibliup does not print the first when it means the second. A read that faults is never remembered as an emptiness, never tallied as one, and never dressed up as a blank page of a book you own. Where the reason is known, the wording says which.
Vetted building blocks
Where a problem is already solved well, Bibliup uses the standard tool rather than a home-made one, pinned so every install is the same.
- Docker Compose
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS 4
- Bun
- Elasticsearch
- MongoDB
- LocalAI
- Whisper
- Your own GPU, or none
- OpenAPI 3.1
- GraphQL
- MCP
- Yjs
- Service worker
- Prometheus
- OpenTelemetry
Not out yet. Nearly there.
Bibliup is in the making: a study tool that never paraphrases your sources and never invents a citation.* Star the repository and you will hear when it lands.