# What is SecondStack

> SecondStack is a self-hosted enterprise AI platform — SecondChat, SecondGate, SecondGuard, SecondAgent, plus budgets and RAG on your own infrastructure.

Canonical: <https://docs.secondstack.ai/getting-started/what-is-secondstack/>
Updated: 2026-07-07

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SecondStack is a **self-hosted enterprise AI platform** for deploying, managing, and scaling conversational AI across an organization. It bundles **SecondChat** (the chat app), **SecondGate** (the LLM gateway), **SecondGuard** (guardrails), cost controls, retrieval (RAG), and **SecondAgent** (the agent runtime) into a single platform that runs entirely on infrastructure you control.

The umbrella promise is simple: **own your AI infrastructure.** Conversations, attached documents, and usage data stay in your own environment, and you decide which models, providers, and policies your teams can use.

## Who it is for

SecondStack serves two closely related needs, often in the same organization:

- **A self-hosted AI platform** — a chat, code, and agent experience for teams that want a multi-provider AI workspace without sending their data to a third-party SaaS.
- **An enterprise LLM gateway** — a central control point for platform, security, and IT teams that need visibility, access control, budgets, and guardrails over all LLM traffic.

## Why self-host

- **Data sovereignty** — chat history, documents, and usage logs stay in your own PostgreSQL database and infrastructure. You control retention, backups, and access.
- **Multi-model flexibility** — route to Claude, GPT, Gemini, Databricks, OpenRouter, and self-hosted open-weight models from one place, instead of locking into a single vendor.
- **Consumption pricing** — pay for actual LLM API usage rather than per-seat subscriptions. In larger organizations, where most users are low-volume, this is typically far more cost-effective than flat per-seat fees.
- **Customizable behavior** — shape how the AI behaves with system prompts, guardrails, and agent Skills, tuned to your policies.

## What's inside

SecondStack is a productized, self-hostable platform composed of several services that work together:

| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| [SecondChat](/features/chat-app/) | The multi-model chat UI with image generation, voice input, attachments, RAG, and agents. |
| [SecondAgent](/features/ai-agent/) | The agent mode that runs Claude Code in per-thread Docker sandboxes with built-in Skills. |
| [SecondGate](/features/api-routing/) | The LLM API gateway that centralizes traffic with virtual API keys, SecondGuard guardrails, and budgets. |
| [Cost Management](/features/cost-management/) | Per-user, per-team, and per-API-key budgets with threshold alerts and usage analytics. |
| [Knowledge Collections](/features/knowledge-collections/) | Named, shareable document sets auto-indexed for retrieval inside chats. |
| [ControlTower](/features/controltower/) | Admin dashboard for models, providers, prompts, guardrails, and access control. |
| [User Dashboard](/features/user-dashboard/) | Self-service API keys, personal budgets, and per-request usage logs. |

Under the hood, the platform also runs supporting infrastructure — PostgreSQL for data, OpenResty as the API gateway/ingress, content-extraction services for documents, Meilisearch for chat search, a vector database for embeddings, and a built-in **Authentik** identity core that federates to your upstream identity provider, such as Entra ID (Azure AD), Okta, or Keycloak, for single sign-on.

## Next steps

- Learn how the platform is deployed in [Self-Hosting](/getting-started/self-hosting/).
- Browse the [features](/features/chat-app/) to see what each part does.
- Check the [FAQ](/resources/faq/) for deployment, security, and model questions.