What Is Verba? A Complete Guide to Your Self-Hosted RAG Chatbot
Verba is an open-source RAG chatbot built on Weaviate for self-hosted document Q&A. Learn about its features, architecture, and deployment options.
What Is Verba?
Verba is an open-source Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot built on top of Weaviate, one of the most popular open-source vector databases. Designed to make document Q&A accessible to everyone, Verba provides a polished web interface where you can upload documents, ask questions in natural language, and get answers grounded in your own data — all while running entirely on your own infrastructure.
Key Features
Verba ships with a rich set of features out of the box. It supports multiple embedding models and LLM providers, giving you the flexibility to choose between OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, Ollama locally, or any custom combination. The multi-modal RAG pipeline can handle PDFs, text files, markdown, and images, extracting meaning from each format automatically. Its visual dashboard lets you explore your ingested data, inspect chunks, and understand exactly where your answers are coming from — complete with source citations.
Why Use Verba for RAG?
Building a production-quality RAG system from scratch requires orchestrating an embedding service, a vector store, an LLM gateway, and a frontend. Verba bundles all of these into a single Docker-based deployment. You get Weaviate as your vector database (rock-solid, horizontally scalable), pre-configured embedder integrations, and an intuitive chat interface — without writing a single line of glue code.
Who Is It For?
Verba is ideal for knowledge workers, researchers, legal teams, and developers who need to query large document collections privately. Whether you are building an internal knowledge base, analyzing research papers, or providing document search for your organization, Verba makes it straightforward. It is also an excellent learning tool for understanding how modern RAG pipelines work end-to-end.
Conclusion
With 7700+ GitHub stars, an active community, and tight integration with Weaviate, Verba is one of the most polished open-source RAG solutions available today. Its one-command Docker deployment makes it accessible even for non-developers, while its modular architecture gives developers room to customize every layer of the pipeline.