ChatPanel
Summary
Every AI assistant asks you to stop what you're doing — copy the paragraph, paste it in, switch the tab, lose your place. ChatPanel installs into Chrome's side panel and reads the page you're already on.
The core workflow is context-without-copying: the panel pulls in the active tab, highlighted text, or a link you paste, and forwards it to whichever model you point it at — local, self-hosted, or cloud. Meeting transcription works by reading live captions on Zoom, Meet, Teams, or Webex rather than touching your audio stream, which means no cloud recording consent issue, but also means it breaks the moment captions are off or unavailable. The agent-action feature lets you describe a form fill or button click in plain language, but it asks for confirmation before sensitive steps rather than running blind. The tool directory and diagram generation on canvas apps are paid-only features. Teams who need unlimited AI-connected tools or on-device name and location redaction hit the free tier's ceiling fast.
Bottom line: Pick this if you want a persistent AI sidebar that never touches your clipboard and keeps conversation history searchable on your own machine — but if your workflow depends on agents running multi-step autonomous tasks across many tools, the built-in tool directory's one-tool free limit and lack of a public API will force a parallel architecture.
Pricing Plans
Subscription- Free Tier
- First 10 notes; basic redaction; no meeting assistance or vector diagrams
Free
Core features including local model, basic tools, first 10 notes, and manual redaction
- In-browser AI
- On-screen context
- Basic skills
- 10 notes
Pro
Unlimited notes, advanced diagram output, meeting assistance, AI auto-redaction, and export
- Meetings
- Diagrams whiteboards
- AI auto-detect redaction
- Export backup
- Unlimited notes
View full pricing on chatpanel.net →
Pricing may have changed since last verified. Check the official site for current plans.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- Reads the active tab, selected text, or a pasted link without clipboard access, so you never lose your reading context to switch between the page and the assistant.
- On-device PII redaction with reversible substitution, so client names, phone numbers, and credentials in your prompts never reach the model — an architectural guarantee cloud-only tools cannot make.
- Caption-based meeting transcription on Zoom, Meet, Teams, and Webex never uploads audio or video, so you get searchable action items and running notes without triggering your organization's cloud recording policy.
- Provider-agnostic model routing — local Ollama, self-hosted endpoints, Claude, Codex, or the bundled in-browser WebGPU model — so a cost spike or API outage is a one-config-change problem rather than a migration.
- Local conversation history with a visual topic map, so you can search and resurface context from past sessions without depending on a vendor's server retention policy.
Cons
Sign in to edit- Meeting transcription breaks entirely when the meeting host disables captions or when the platform does not surface them in the DOM — no fallback exists, and teams who need reliable transcription across all meeting conditions switch to a dedicated transcription service that ingests audio.
- There is no public API and no shared workspace, which means every saved note, skill, and conversation lives on one machine; teams who need shared prompt libraries or collaborative AI workflows cannot build on top of ChatPanel and end up maintaining a separate tool for anything multi-user.
- The free tier limits the tool directory to one connected tool, so the moment a workflow requires search plus a data source plus a third-party app, you hit a paid-only wall — teams evaluating this for multi-tool agent pipelines discover the ceiling during the first real use case, not the demo.
- Act on Page automation is scoped to single-page interactions with a confirmation step before sensitive actions; any workflow that spans multiple pages, runs on a schedule, or needs to execute without confirmation requires a separate automation layer, at which point you are maintaining two systems.
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About
- Platforms
- Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- Yes
- Last Updated
- 2026-07-22T06:29:13.622Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Users who want one persistent AI interface across all browser tabs
- Professionals needing meeting transcription and summarization without cloud audio upload
- Developers and power users who already maintain local or self-hosted models
- Anyone requiring on-device PII redaction before sending prompts to any model
What it does well
- Chat with AI about the current web page without copying content
- Generate live meeting notes and action items from captions on Zoom, Meet, or Teams
- Fill forms and click page elements using plain-language instructions
- Maintain a local searchable notebook with AI co-writing and wiki-links
Integrations
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is ChatPanel free?
- ChatPanel has a permanent free tier alongside paid upgrades. You can keep using a baseline version indefinitely without paying.
- Is ChatPanel open source?
- No — ChatPanel is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- Can I self-host ChatPanel?
- Yes. ChatPanel supports self-hosting on your own infrastructure.
- What platforms does ChatPanel support?
- ChatPanel is available on: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc.
Hours Saved & ROI Stories Community
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Curated lists that include this category
The core problem ChatPanel addresses is context switching: every time you consult an AI about a page, document, or meeting, the standard workflow is copy, switch tab, paste, wait, switch back. ChatPanel attaches a persistent side panel to Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc that reads the current page on demand — no clipboard involved. You bring your own model (Claude, Codex, a local Ollama instance, or the in-browser WebGPU model that downloads once on first install) and ChatPanel routes your prompts to it, with the page content included only when you ask. Conversation history is stored locally and indexed into a searchable visual map grouped by topic.
The standout differentiator is the privacy layer. Before any prompt leaves your device, ChatPanel can redact PII — phone numbers, emails, card numbers, and API keys on the free tier; names, organizations, and locations via on-device AI detection on the paid tier. The substitution is reversible: the model reasons over opaque placeholders, and the real values are restored in the reply you read. The AI never sees the original data. For professionals handling client information, this is the architectural control that cloud-based AI sidebars structurally cannot offer.
ChatPanel fits cleanly for solo professionals or developers who already maintain local or self-hosted models and want one consistent AI interface across browser tabs, calls, and note-taking. It fits less cleanly when a team needs shared workflows: there is no API, no team workspace, and no webhook surface, so everything stays on one person’s machine. The agent action feature — filling forms and clicking elements via plain-language instruction — is genuinely useful for repetitive data entry, but it is scoped to single-page interactions and requires explicit confirmation before sensitive steps, which means it is not a substitute for a headless automation layer like Playwright or n8n for anything multi-page or scheduled.
Meeting transcription reads live captions from Zoom, Meet, Teams, and Webex — it does not record audio or video. That architecture sidesteps consent and compliance questions around cloud audio storage, but it creates a hard dependency on the meeting platform’s caption system being enabled and visible. The vendor describes diagram generation on Excalidraw, draw.io, and tldraw as a paid feature; on the free tier, the agent falls back to pixel-level mouse simulation, which the vendor’s own documentation describes as slow and imprecise.