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The Klio engine is open source and self-hostable. Self-hosting is free, nothing leaves your machine, and the guarantees are stronger than Cloud’s: memory is encrypted at rest under a key you own, and every write is chained with SHA-256 so the history is tamper-evident.

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Prerequisites

  • Docker running — check with docker info
  • Node 20+ — needed only to run the launcher via npx
  • ~8 GB free disk for the container images
  • (macOS, if you choose the Ollama provider) a working ollama install for Metal acceleration. On Linux the docker-ollama compose profile is used as a CPU fallback.

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Install

That single command pulls the containers (engine, bridge, dashboard, plus Postgres and Redis), boots them, runs migrations, walks you through provider and model selection, detects every supported AI agent on your machine, and patches each one’s MCP config. Roughly 30 seconds on a warm Docker, about two minutes on a cold first run.
klio init accepts --local or --cloud to skip the prompt, and --email <addr> to pre-fill the claim address. Pin a specific build with --image-tag <tag>.

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Confirm it is up

This reports what is running, where, and as whom. Your agents should now list the ten Klio tools without any further configuration — the launcher already wrote their MCP config for you.

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What you get that Cloud does not

Keys you own

Memory is encrypted at rest under a key you hold. On Klio Cloud the keys are ours.

Tamper-evident history

Every write is chained with SHA-256, so the history can be independently verified. Cloud writes are not hash-chained today.
Anywhere the docs mention a user-held encryption key or a hash chain, that refers to the self-hosted engine specifically. See What Klio keeps for the Cloud equivalent.

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Connecting agents manually

The launcher patches agent configs for you, but if you need to wire one by hand it is the same MCP endpoint on your own host:
Everything in Any MCP client applies unchanged — only the base URL differs.

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Day-two operations

See the CLI reference for the full flag set.
uninstall deletes your memory store. down is the one you want for stopping the stack temporarily.

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Source and licence

The engine lives at github.com/klio-tech/klio. Klio is open core: the engine and MCP shim are open source and free to self-host, while Klio Cloud is the hosted commercial product.