Open WebUI
App : A product you use directly
Self-hosted chat interface in the style of ChatGPT, connected to Ollama or any OpenAI API.
The best interface for sharing a local chat with a family or a team.
Security reflects where data goes, requested permissions and incidents on record at the verification date. It is not a guarantee of zero risk: check the deployment mode and the connections you enable.
What it does, concretely
Managing multiple AI models across scattered interfaces, or relying on a cloud service for every conversation, complicates daily use and raises questions about data privacy. Open WebUI addresses this by providing a self-hosted web interface that centralises all your models in one place, without sending your data to a third party.
In practice, you install Open WebUI on your machine or server via Docker or pip, then connect it to Ollama for local models or to any OpenAI-compatible API (LMStudio, GroqCloud, Mistral, OpenRouter, and others). The interface resembles ChatGPT: you create conversations, attach documents, run web searches, and generate images, all from a browser.
Open WebUI suits individuals who want to keep control of their data, families or small teams who want to share an AI assistant on a local network, and organisations that need fine-grained access control, SSO authentication, or air-gapped deployment.
That said, the tool requires some technical knowledge for initial installation and configuration. It is not suited to someone looking for a ready-to-use solution without touching Docker or the command line.
What it offers
- ·Connection to Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible API (LMStudio, GroqCloud, Mistral, OpenRouter, vLLM, and more) from a single interface.
- ·Local RAG with support for 9 vector databases, hybrid search, and content extraction from documents or URLs via the # command.
- ·Integrated web search across many providers (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Bing, Perplexity, Kagi, and others) injected directly into the conversation.
- ·User management with granular roles, groups, and permissions, plus LDAP, SSO authentication, and SCIM 2.0 provisioning (paid for enterprise features).
- ·Image generation and editing via DALL·E, Gemini, ComfyUI, or AUTOMATIC1111.
- ·Hands-free voice and video calls with multiple speech-to-text engines (local Whisper, OpenAI, Deepgram, Azure) and text-to-speech engines.
- ·Plugin system (Filters, Actions, Pipes, Tools) extensible in Python, with connections to MCP and OpenAPI tool servers.
- ·Native desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with a system-wide chat bar and local inference via a built-in llama.cpp engine.
In practice
- Price
- Free
- Commercial use
- Commercial use: yes
- Available on
- docker, linux, macos, windows
- Licence
- Open WebUI License (BSD-3 modifiée)
Security and data
- Rating
- Security: one caveat, see the card
- Your data
- Data stays local
- Maintenance
- Active
- Last release
- 16 October 2026
Links and repository checked on 25 October 2026 · added on 1 October 2023
How to install Open WebUI
docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main