{"slug": "open-webui", "name": "Open WebUI", "category": "selfhosted", "category_name": "Self-hosted and home server", "description": "Self-hosted web chat interface for local and API-based large language models.", "recommenders": 12, "commenters": 35, "warners": 3, "score": 13.711, "rising": 2.71, "first": "2025-11-01", "latest": "2026-10-26", "why": "HN commenters like it as a self-hosted ChatGPT replacement that connects to local or API models such as Ollama, llama-server and OpenRouter, with add-ons for tools and documents.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 12, "neutral": 21, "compare": 0, "warn": 3}, "spark": [1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 2, 1, 4, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["ChatGPT replacement", "Backend flexibility"], "caveat": "Custom license", "short_quote": "really recommend OpenWebui as a ChatGPT replacement", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/open-webui/open-webui", "official_url": "https://openwebui.com", "pricing": "free", "aliases": ["Open WebUI", "OpenWebUI", "OpenWeb UI"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like it as a self-hosted ChatGPT replacement", "cites": [{"id": 781069712, "item_id": 48816857, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816857", "by": "pixlmint", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "really recommend OpenWebui as a ChatGPT replacement", "excerpt": "I have OpenWebui hosted on my homelab, but you can also just have it live on your machine in a docker container. I honestly just embrace the iffy feeling. Openrouter has very good telemetry (which is partly why I went with them) and it'd be pretty easy to notice when someone other than myself uses my keys. For the little agentic coding I do I like to use OpenCode, and if I need to ask a question in my editor I use Co", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "ChatGPT replacement via OpenRouter", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"}, {"id": 755901729, "item_id": 47243858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243858", "by": "shreyaspapi", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built Oval because I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative but missed having a proper native Mac app for it. What it does: - Native SwiftUI macOS client that connects to any Open WebUI server - On-device voice mode \u2014 STT and TTS run locally via RunAnywhere SDK (Whisper ONNX or WhisperKit on Apple Neural Engine), only the LLM call goes to your server - Realtime transcription with speaker diari", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oval \u2013 Native macOS client for Open WebUI with on-device voice mode"}, {"id": 746451312, "item_id": 46653207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653207", "by": "9cb14c1ec0", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts.", "excerpt": "I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "ChatGPT", "story": "Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT"}, {"id": 732478097, "item_id": 45779881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779881", "by": "Greenpants", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "my work laptop has its own Open WebUI account for separation", "excerpt": "I got a personal Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB RAM for a silent, relatively power-efficient yet powerful home server. It runs Ollama + Open WebUI with GPT-OSS 120b as well as GLM4.5-Air (default quantisations). I rarely ever use ChatGPT anymore. Love that all data stays at home. I connect remotely only via VPN (my phone enables this automatically via Tasker). I'm 50% brainstorming ideas with it, asking critical questi", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}]}, {"text": " that connects to local or API models such as Ollama, llama-server and OpenRouter, with add-ons for tools and documents.", "cites": [{"id": 791703074, "item_id": 49481442, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481442", "by": "wolvoleo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it with llama-server and openwebui.", "excerpt": "Similar here, except I used Opus 4.8. I don't mind using cloud models to make code as long as I don't put actual private data into the model. And I can't run qwen 27b reliably at the moment, I need a better gpu. It was pretty easy mode like this tbh, though you do need to know what you're doing. I use it with llama-server and openwebui. I guess you can get it a lot more click to go with something like LM Studio thoug", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio"}, {"id": 732481601, "item_id": 45780100, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780100", "by": "dnel", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama", "excerpt": "I recently picked up a Threadripper 3960x, 256GB DDR4 and RTX2080ti 11GB running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama. It runs well, not much difference to Claude etc but still learning the ropes and how to get the best out of it and local llms in general. Having tonnes of memory is nice for switching out models in ollama quickly since everything stays in cache. The GPU memory is the weak point though so I'm mostly us", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 746451312, "item_id": 46653207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653207", "by": "9cb14c1ec0", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts.", "excerpt": "I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "ChatGPT", "story": "Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT"}, {"id": 783488530, "item_id": 48968033, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968033", "by": "eurekin", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions)", "excerpt": "It's a mcp, so connects quite easily to agents. With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions). Used it in claude code with that mcp plugin set-up too. Only ever used it for managing homelab information, but it met initial expectations. 27b is a great model, if grounded. The query about physical hosts and routing... I haven't found a single hallucination (alto", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI with tool support", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon"}, {"id": 774574608, "item_id": 48410913, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410913", "by": "blfr", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.", "excerpt": "I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly. Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out. That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with ", "context": "", "use_case": "processing large PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is its custom license, which commenters say is no longer truly open source,", "cites": [{"id": 732786384, "item_id": 45799149, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799149", "by": "mythz", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks", "excerpt": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks [1], in their own words [2]: [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_webui_is_no_longer_open_source/ [2] https://docs.openwebui.com/license/", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS Alternative to Open WebUI \u2013 ChatGPT-Like UI, API and CLI"}, {"id": 748287536, "item_id": 46767971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767971", "by": "turblety", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me", "excerpt": "This looks great. I've been using OpenWebUI for a while now and the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me. This looks like it's not only a better license, but also much better features.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM web UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS ChatGPT WebUI \u2013 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio Gen"}]}, {"text": " and some find it bloated or fiddly to set up exactly as they want.", "cites": [{"id": 779940114, "item_id": 48746257, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746257", "by": "coder543", "date": "2026-07-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "options like Open WebUI seem really bloated", "excerpt": "It\u2019s not FUD. It is my actual, lived experience. FUD is false, which this is not. I use both vLLM and llama-server. vLLM is very painful, even with the Spark community docker image. It is slow to start, it does not support 3-bit dynamic quants well, and it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to run well for each model I want to try out, which is made worse by the slow starts. I\u2019m glad you\u2019ve had a better experience? I ", "context": "", "use_case": "chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"}, {"id": 785526256, "item_id": 49095391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095391", "by": "peheje", "date": "2026-07-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "now I\u2019m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want", "excerpt": "I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I\u2019ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and healt", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted AI interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "ChatGPT replacement", "summary": "Used as a self-hosted alternative to ChatGPT, with some commenters saying they rarely use ChatGPT anymore.", "quotes": [{"id": 781069712, "item_id": 48816857, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816857", "by": "pixlmint", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "really recommend OpenWebui as a ChatGPT replacement", "excerpt": "I have OpenWebui hosted on my homelab, but you can also just have it live on your machine in a docker container. I honestly just embrace the iffy feeling. Openrouter has very good telemetry (which is partly why I went with them) and it'd be pretty easy to notice when someone other than myself uses my keys. For the little agentic coding I do I like to use OpenCode, and if I need to ask a question in my editor I use Co", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "ChatGPT replacement via OpenRouter", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"}, {"id": 755901729, "item_id": 47243858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243858", "by": "shreyaspapi", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built Oval because I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative but missed having a proper native Mac app for it. What it does: - Native SwiftUI macOS client that connects to any Open WebUI server - On-device voice mode \u2014 STT and TTS run locally via RunAnywhere SDK (Whisper ONNX or WhisperKit on Apple Neural Engine), only the LLM call goes to your server - Realtime transcription with speaker diari", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oval \u2013 Native macOS client for Open WebUI with on-device voice mode"}, {"id": 732478097, "item_id": 45779881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779881", "by": "Greenpants", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "my work laptop has its own Open WebUI account for separation", "excerpt": "I got a personal Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB RAM for a silent, relatively power-efficient yet powerful home server. It runs Ollama + Open WebUI with GPT-OSS 120b as well as GLM4.5-Air (default quantisations). I rarely ever use ChatGPT anymore. Love that all data stays at home. I connect remotely only via VPN (my phone enables this automatically via Tasker). I'm 50% brainstorming ideas with it, asking critical questi", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}]}, {"label": "Backend flexibility", "summary": "Works with local servers like Ollama, llama-server and vLLM, and with API providers like OpenRouter.", "quotes": [{"id": 791703074, "item_id": 49481442, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481442", "by": "wolvoleo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it with llama-server and openwebui.", "excerpt": "Similar here, except I used Opus 4.8. I don't mind using cloud models to make code as long as I don't put actual private data into the model. And I can't run qwen 27b reliably at the moment, I need a better gpu. It was pretty easy mode like this tbh, though you do need to know what you're doing. I use it with llama-server and openwebui. I guess you can get it a lot more click to go with something like LM Studio thoug", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio"}, {"id": 732481601, "item_id": 45780100, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780100", "by": "dnel", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama", "excerpt": "I recently picked up a Threadripper 3960x, 256GB DDR4 and RTX2080ti 11GB running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama. It runs well, not much difference to Claude etc but still learning the ropes and how to get the best out of it and local llms in general. Having tonnes of memory is nice for switching out models in ollama quickly since everything stays in cache. The GPU memory is the weak point though so I'm mostly us", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 746451312, "item_id": 46653207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653207", "by": "9cb14c1ec0", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts.", "excerpt": "I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "ChatGPT", "story": "Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT"}]}, {"label": "Remote access", "summary": "Runs in a container and can be reached remotely through tunnels, Tailscale or a VPN.", "quotes": [{"id": 789188629, "item_id": 49324289, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324289", "by": "alexjplant", "date": "2026-08-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open WebUI in a container", "excerpt": "If you don't have regulatory hurdles to jump over then there are a whole raft of open-weight models that perform basically as well as Anthropic's offerings (and, in many cases, better because they're pulling fewer capacity-stretching shenanigans). Check out Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM series models in particular with something like OpenCode or Pi as a coding harness. If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open We", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Seems Down"}, {"id": 776719778, "item_id": 48544986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544986", "by": "porkloin", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "open-webui (running as podman quadlet exposed via tailscale svc) allows me to access any of the models", "excerpt": "I have good results with this setup: Hardware: - GPU: AMD 7900xtx, 24gb vram - CPU: AMD 5950x, AM4 - RAM: 64gb DDR4 3600 Software: - OS: Bazzite (atomic fedora - this machine is running Steam \"big picture\" mode on my TV when not in use for LLM tasks) - Virtualization: Podman Quadlets, which allows me to run container images as managed systemd units - Network: tailscale - Inference: llama.cpp vulkan (better performanc", "context": "", "use_case": "web chat for local models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"}, {"id": 732478097, "item_id": 45779881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779881", "by": "Greenpants", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "my work laptop has its own Open WebUI account for separation", "excerpt": "I got a personal Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB RAM for a silent, relatively power-efficient yet powerful home server. It runs Ollama + Open WebUI with GPT-OSS 120b as well as GLM4.5-Air (default quantisations). I rarely ever use ChatGPT anymore. Love that all data stays at home. I connect remotely only via VPN (my phone enables this automatically via Tasker). I'm 50% brainstorming ideas with it, asking critical questi", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}]}, {"label": "Tools and extensions", "summary": "Commenters connect it to MCP tools, search and document pipelines, and value the community tools and functions.", "quotes": [{"id": 783488530, "item_id": 48968033, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968033", "by": "eurekin", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions)", "excerpt": "It's a mcp, so connects quite easily to agents. With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions). Used it in claude code with that mcp plugin set-up too. Only ever used it for managing homelab information, but it met initial expectations. 27b is a great model, if grounded. The query about physical hosts and routing... I haven't found a single hallucination (alto", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI with tool support", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon"}, {"id": 774574608, "item_id": 48410913, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410913", "by": "blfr", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.", "excerpt": "I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly. Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out. That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with ", "context": "", "use_case": "processing large PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy"}, {"id": 753782448, "item_id": 47111403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47111403", "by": "MariosAdamidis", "date": "2026-02-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really want to thank the owui community for the great lessons and tools/functions.", "excerpt": "In the past year i have been learning and experimenting, and have assembled a stack which now seems to me like a solid foundation for lab applications such as data processing. As a PhD student in the Greek reality, my budget was tight especially initially so i have made my basis mostly on the free vertex gemini trial. I have customized an existing gemini pipeline (thank you owndev) to better handle multi-round native", "context": "PhD student in Greece building lab AI tooling", "use_case": "self-hosted AI stack for labs", "switched_from": "", "story": "FORTHought: Self hosted AI stack for physics labs (and more) built on OpenWebUI"}]}, {"label": "Model independence", "summary": "Keeps one interface while users switch models or providers, which helps avoid lock-in.", "quotes": [{"id": 798406800, "item_id": 49900425, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49900425", "by": "reachableceo", "date": "2026-09-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this.", "excerpt": "I mean it\u2019s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said. OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal. I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I\u2019m doing is tied to that harness. When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I di", "context": "", "use_case": "avoiding platform lock-in", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dots: Always-on agents"}, {"id": 736769968, "item_id": 46048123, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048123", "by": "crocowhile", "date": "2025-11-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using openwebui which is under active development", "excerpt": "In a landscape where every week we have a different leading model, these systems are really useful for the power users because they keep the interface and models constant and allow to switch easily using API via openrouter or naga. I have been using openwebui which is under active development but I'll give this a try.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI for multiple models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) \u2013 Open-source chat UI"}]}, {"label": "Conversation branching", "summary": "One commenter loves its tree-style tracking of conversation branches.", "quotes": [{"id": 786885793, "item_id": 49180362, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180362", "by": "wongarsu", "date": "2026-08-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Actual tracking in a tree sounds like an awesome feature (and one that I love in conversational UIs like openwebui as well)", "excerpt": "Claude code in the cli also has /fork to clone the current session state. But if you use it more than once or twice that quickly becomes hard to manage. Actual tracking in a tree sounds like an awesome feature (and one that I love in conversational UIs like openwebui as well)", "context": "", "use_case": "conversational UI with tree sessions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Custom license", "summary": "It moved to a custom license meant to limit competitive forks, and branding can't simply be paid for.", "quotes": [{"id": 732786384, "item_id": 45799149, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799149", "by": "mythz", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks", "excerpt": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks [1], in their own words [2]: [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_webui_is_no_longer_open_source/ [2] https://docs.openwebui.com/license/", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS Alternative to Open WebUI \u2013 ChatGPT-Like UI, API and CLI"}, {"id": 748287536, "item_id": 46767971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767971", "by": "turblety", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me", "excerpt": "This looks great. I've been using OpenWebUI for a while now and the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me. This looks like it's not only a better license, but also much better features.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM web UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS ChatGPT WebUI \u2013 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio Gen"}]}, {"label": "Bloat", "summary": "One commenter finds it bloated.", "quotes": [{"id": 779940114, "item_id": 48746257, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746257", "by": "coder543", "date": "2026-07-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "options like Open WebUI seem really bloated", "excerpt": "It\u2019s not FUD. It is my actual, lived experience. FUD is false, which this is not. I use both vLLM and llama-server. vLLM is very painful, even with the Spark community docker image. It is slow to start, it does not support 3-bit dynamic quants well, and it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to run well for each model I want to try out, which is made worse by the slow starts. I\u2019m glad you\u2019ve had a better experience? I ", "context": "", "use_case": "chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"}]}, {"label": "Setup effort", "summary": "Getting it to work exactly as wanted takes effort, and some don't want to host it themselves.", "quotes": [{"id": 785526256, "item_id": 49095391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095391", "by": "peheje", "date": "2026-07-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "now I\u2019m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want", "excerpt": "I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I\u2019ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and healt", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted AI interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)"}, {"id": 795721376, "item_id": 49732586, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732586", "by": "jiri", "date": "2026-09-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I know openwebui and i dont want to host it.", "excerpt": "I would like to have alternative to chat - model and provider agnostic (BYOK), but with history, project, maybe memory, with good search and quality tools. I know openwebui and i dont want to host it.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat frontend for multiple models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"}]}, {"label": "Ollama-centric", "summary": "One commenter saw it as little more than a front-end to Ollama and switched to llama.cpp's built-in UI.", "quotes": [{"id": 732896434, "item_id": 45806027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806027", "by": "stuxnet79", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I sort of lost interest in Open WebUI.", "excerpt": "It seems like the ecosystem around these tools has matured quite rapidly. I am somewhat familiar with Open WebUI, however, the last time I played around with it, I got the sense that it was merely a front-end to Ollama, the llm command line tool & it didn't have any capabilities outside of that. I got spooked when the Ollama team started monetizing so I ended up doing more research into llama.cpp and realized it coul", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat front-end", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}]}], "who": [{"by": "jabrotapu", "context": "freelancer building on-prem GPU clusters", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661006", "date": "2026-09-11"}, {"by": "reachableceo", "context": "CTO adopting an agent stack", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459948", "date": "2026-08-27"}, {"by": "Zambyte", "context": "uses an e-paper Daylight DC-1", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49248099", "date": "2026-08-10"}, {"by": "iamniels", "context": "evaluating for their company", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183335", "date": "2026-08-05"}, {"by": "pixlmint", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816857", "date": "2026-07-07"}, {"by": "MariosAdamidis", "context": "PhD student in Greece building lab AI tooling", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47111403", "date": "2026-02-22"}], "tags": ["self-hostable", "for homelabs", "for local LLMs", "for small teams"], "use_cases": ["llm chat interface", "local llm frontend", "chat frontend for local models", "avoiding platform lock-in", "chat frontend for multiple models", "private llm chat"], "compared": [{"slug": "ollama", "name": "Ollama", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "chatgpt", "name": "ChatGPT", "co": 4, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pi", "name": "Pi", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "openrouter", "name": "OpenRouter", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "llama-cpp", "name": "llama.cpp", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "opencode", "name": "OpenCode", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-opus", "name": "Claude Opus", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "qwen-3-6", "name": "Qwen 3.6", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771870", "title": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100", "title": "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238739", "title": "PaperPilot \u2013 Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49896604", "title": "Dots: Always-on agents", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49729412", "title": "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522905", "title": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2026)", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 5, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 2}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1, "neutral": 5}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 2}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803843440, "item_id": 50240215, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50240215", "by": "Tepix", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Can I use it with Open-Webui instead of Apache Tika?", "excerpt": "Can I use it with Open-Webui instead of Apache Tika?", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "PaperPilot \u2013 Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP"}, {"id": 798406800, "item_id": 49900425, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49900425", "by": "reachableceo", "date": "2026-09-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this.", "excerpt": "I mean it\u2019s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said. OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal. I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I\u2019m doing is tied to that harness. When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I di", "context": "", "use_case": "avoiding platform lock-in", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dots: Always-on agents"}, {"id": 795721376, "item_id": 49732586, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732586", "by": "jiri", "date": "2026-09-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I know openwebui and i dont want to host it.", "excerpt": "I would like to have alternative to chat - model and provider agnostic (BYOK), but with history, project, maybe memory, with good search and quality tools. I know openwebui and i dont want to host it.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat frontend for multiple models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"}, {"id": 794576104, "item_id": 49661006, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661006", "by": "jabrotapu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "LLM chat: Ollama, Open WebUI", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK | India, remote | Part-time | Overlap with US, UK, EU hours I build on-prem GPU clusters and private AI apps that run entirely on the client's own hardware, so their data never leaves the building. About 10 years full-stack, the last few on GPU infrastructure. Currently running a live production cluster: 700-800 users sharing a small physical GPU pool. GPU-backed JupyterHub, single sign-on, per-user quot", "context": "freelancer building on-prem GPU clusters", "use_case": "private LLM chat", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2026)"}, {"id": 794129635, "item_id": 49633102, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49633102", "by": "spijdar", "date": "2026-09-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "via Open WebUI", "excerpt": "This is Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_S quantization (edit -- on llama.cpp, via the Vulkan backend, on an RX 7900 XT, with Unsloth's recommended sampler config), for \"as replicable as LLMs can be\" disclosure, done through llama.cpp's web UI. In another thread, via Open WebUI (both with no custom prompt, so whatever the \"default\" system prompt is), a reasoning block opens as such: We need answer user's request: write complete sho", "context": "", "use_case": "chat frontend for local models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills"}, {"id": 791703074, "item_id": 49481442, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481442", "by": "wolvoleo", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it with llama-server and openwebui.", "excerpt": "Similar here, except I used Opus 4.8. I don't mind using cloud models to make code as long as I don't put actual private data into the model. And I can't run qwen 27b reliably at the moment, I need a better gpu. It was pretty easy mode like this tbh, though you do need to know what you're doing. I use it with llama-server and openwebui. I guess you can get it a lot more click to go with something like LM Studio thoug", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio"}, {"id": 791359170, "item_id": 49459948, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459948", "by": "reachableceo", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "managed by four very high trust humans via OWUI", "excerpt": "It\u2019s called using systems of record. I use redmine and discourse. Jointly with my stack of agents (COO) (managed by four very high trust humans via OWUI interacting with scoped Hermes profiles ). I\u2019m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero", "context": "CTO adopting an agent stack", "use_case": "interface to agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"}, {"id": 789188629, "item_id": 49324289, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324289", "by": "alexjplant", "date": "2026-08-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open WebUI in a container", "excerpt": "If you don't have regulatory hurdles to jump over then there are a whole raft of open-weight models that perform basically as well as Anthropic's offerings (and, in many cases, better because they're pulling fewer capacity-stretching shenanigans). Check out Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM series models in particular with something like OpenCode or Pi as a coding harness. If you need a Claude-alike web UI then spin up Open We", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Seems Down"}, {"id": 787969584, "item_id": 49248099, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49248099", "by": "Zambyte", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use OpenWebUI and other streaming LLM interfaces flawlessly.", "excerpt": "E-ink TM is not the future of e-paper. I've been using a Daylight DC-1 for about a year and a half now, which has an e-paper display that is 60Hz, and is butter smooth. I use OpenWebUI and other streaming LLM interfaces flawlessly.", "context": "uses an e-paper Daylight DC-1", "use_case": "streaming LLM interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?"}, {"id": 786933360, "item_id": 49183335, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49183335", "by": "iamniels", "date": "2026-08-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Currently I'm test driving Open WebUI.", "excerpt": "This is close to what I need for my company. Currently I'm test driving Open WebUI. https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui", "context": "evaluating for their company", "use_case": "company AI chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work"}, {"id": 786885793, "item_id": 49180362, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180362", "by": "wongarsu", "date": "2026-08-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Actual tracking in a tree sounds like an awesome feature (and one that I love in conversational UIs like openwebui as well)", "excerpt": "Claude code in the cli also has /fork to clone the current session state. But if you use it more than once or twice that quickly becomes hard to manage. Actual tracking in a tree sounds like an awesome feature (and one that I love in conversational UIs like openwebui as well)", "context": "", "use_case": "conversational UI with tree sessions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage"}, {"id": 785526256, "item_id": 49095391, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095391", "by": "peheje", "date": "2026-07-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "now I\u2019m wrestling with Open WebUI, trying to make it work exactly the way I want", "excerpt": "I did this too. But honestly, I was getting a little tired of it. Now I use AI to build things I genuinely like and actually use. Nothing particularly fancy. I built a weather website that I use all the time when planning hikes. I also built a generative hiking-route tool: give it a starting point and a distance, and it tries to find interesting paths for you. I\u2019ve made plenty of small helper tools for work and healt", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted AI interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)"}, {"id": 784790690, "item_id": 49049418, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049418", "by": "rglullis", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use to run my OpenWebUI server", "excerpt": "I am using GLM-5.2 via Ollama Cloud in the $20/month plan. With the same plan I can get many different API keys that I use to run my OpenWebUI server, my opencode and pi dev sessions. I am usually running 2 to 4 sessions concurrently, and I never hit quota limits. At work I get Claude, and I was getting reports that I was spending $75 per hour of work on Opus.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment. Let's not ruin it"}, {"id": 784108737, "item_id": 49006796, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006796", "by": "dschroer", "date": "2026-07-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.", "excerpt": "I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance. https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Back to Kagi"}, {"id": 783488530, "item_id": 48968033, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968033", "by": "eurekin", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions)", "excerpt": "It's a mcp, so connects quite easily to agents. With mcpo, I also connected it to open-webui (which has better support for OpenAI style tools/functions). Used it in claude code with that mcp plugin set-up too. Only ever used it for managing homelab information, but it met initial expectations. 27b is a great model, if grounded. The query about physical hosts and routing... I haven't found a single hallucination (alto", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI with tool support", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon"}, {"id": 782174897, "item_id": 48885931, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885931", "by": "blinded", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Then you can connect your pi.dev, openwebui, etc etc to vllm", "excerpt": "Hey sure. It depends, but usually spin up an h100 on lambda.ai or coreweave. They have capacity and their UIs/APIs are nice. I spin it up for an hour or two, believe it was 6~ dollars an hour. Once the gpu instance is up, you need to run vllm and a model, ie https://docs.lambda.ai/education/large-language-models/deploying-nemotron-3-nano/. Then you can connect your pi.dev, openwebui, etc etc to vllm and interact with", "context": "", "use_case": "chat frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you use LLMs for private discussions?"}, {"id": 781069712, "item_id": 48816857, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816857", "by": "pixlmint", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "really recommend OpenWebui as a ChatGPT replacement", "excerpt": "I have OpenWebui hosted on my homelab, but you can also just have it live on your machine in a docker container. I honestly just embrace the iffy feeling. Openrouter has very good telemetry (which is partly why I went with them) and it'd be pretty easy to notice when someone other than myself uses my keys. For the little agentic coding I do I like to use OpenCode, and if I need to ask a question in my editor I use Co", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "ChatGPT replacement via OpenRouter", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"}, {"id": 779940114, "item_id": 48746257, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746257", "by": "coder543", "date": "2026-07-01", "stance": "warn", "quote": "options like Open WebUI seem really bloated", "excerpt": "It\u2019s not FUD. It is my actual, lived experience. FUD is false, which this is not. I use both vLLM and llama-server. vLLM is very painful, even with the Spark community docker image. It is slow to start, it does not support 3-bit dynamic quants well, and it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to run well for each model I want to try out, which is made worse by the slow starts. I\u2019m glad you\u2019ve had a better experience? I ", "context": "", "use_case": "chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"}, {"id": 779242193, "item_id": 48702637, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48702637", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-06-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "home AI stack with Open WebUI", "excerpt": "I use self-hosted SearXNG as part of my low-budget, privacy-oriented home AI stack with Open WebUI. It's a pretty useful tool! I'm a bit hesitant to post this because I'm not really here for self-promotion, but at some point I did have an LLM help me write up a guide on how I implemented it. It's here if anyone is curious: https://optimoss.ai/resources/searxng.html", "context": "", "use_case": "home AI frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG"}, {"id": 776733365, "item_id": 48545835, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545835", "by": "jborak", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I also connect a few other applications to it such as OpenWeb UI", "excerpt": "I'm using 4x RTX 5070's and first-gen AMD threadripper (1950X) to run Qwen3.6 27B (MTP) Q6_K with llama.cpp and it works great as a daily driver with Pi. Around 50-60 toks/sec. I also connect a few other applications to it such as OpenWeb UI and recently set up Bifrost, an LLM gateway, to be the primary access point for the models I serve. I've tried other models such as Qwen3.6 35B A3B and I've found that 27B works ", "context": "", "use_case": "chat frontend for local models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"}, {"id": 776719778, "item_id": 48544986, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544986", "by": "porkloin", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "open-webui (running as podman quadlet exposed via tailscale svc) allows me to access any of the models", "excerpt": "I have good results with this setup: Hardware: - GPU: AMD 7900xtx, 24gb vram - CPU: AMD 5950x, AM4 - RAM: 64gb DDR4 3600 Software: - OS: Bazzite (atomic fedora - this machine is running Steam \"big picture\" mode on my TV when not in use for LLM tasks) - Virtualization: Podman Quadlets, which allows me to run container images as managed systemd units - Network: tailscale - Inference: llama.cpp vulkan (better performanc", "context": "", "use_case": "web chat for local models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"}, {"id": 774574608, "item_id": 48410913, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410913", "by": "blfr", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with a docling container for large pdfs. Works like a charm. I highly recommend it.", "excerpt": "I would rather we be great at tech and sovereign as byproduct than try to copy Americans, poorly. Trump's admin is trying to put breaks on new AI models. Meanwhile we will make procurement even heavier and slower with additional requirements and add more regulation for checkbox enforcement so massive inefficient enterprises can keep newcomers out. That said it was a cool material to test my new open webui setup with ", "context": "", "use_case": "processing large PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, and an EU Open-Source Strategy"}, {"id": 764020227, "item_id": 47751264, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751264", "by": "mapontosevenths", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use OpenWebUI with Ollama", "excerpt": "I'm just some guy on hackernews, but I actually did try this on my DGX Spark. I went back to Gemma 4 after a few rounds. My orchestration model kept having to send the Qwen model back to fix mistakes that Gemma wouldn't have made. I wound up with less working code per hour due to the mistakes. Technically, I use OpenWebUI with Ollama, so I used the weights below, but it should be the same. https://ollama.com/kwangsuk", "context": "", "use_case": "local model chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI"}, {"id": 760733490, "item_id": 47545843, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545843", "by": "kochc", "date": "2026-03-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "every other tool \u2014 Open WebUI, LangChain, my own scripts \u2014 needed the same models re-entered separately", "excerpt": "I use OpenCode which already has GitHub Copilot, Ollama, Anthropic, Gemini etc. configured. But every other tool \u2014 Open WebUI, LangChain, my own scripts \u2014 needed the same models re-entered separately. This plugin starts a local HTTP server on port 4010 that translates between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini API formats and whichever model OpenCode has configured. So you point any tool at http://127.0.0.1:4010/v1 and it", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenCode-LLM-proxy \u2013 use any OpenCode model via OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini API"}, {"id": 755901729, "item_id": 47243858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47243858", "by": "shreyaspapi", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "excerpt": "Hey HN, I built Oval because I use Open WebUI as my self-hosted ChatGPT alternative but missed having a proper native Mac app for it. What it does: - Native SwiftUI macOS client that connects to any Open WebUI server - On-device voice mode \u2014 STT and TTS run locally via RunAnywhere SDK (Whisper ONNX or WhisperKit on Apple Neural Engine), only the LLM call goes to your server - Realtime transcription with speaker diari", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted ChatGPT alternative", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oval \u2013 Native macOS client for Open WebUI with on-device voice mode"}, {"id": 753782448, "item_id": 47111403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47111403", "by": "MariosAdamidis", "date": "2026-02-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really want to thank the owui community for the great lessons and tools/functions.", "excerpt": "In the past year i have been learning and experimenting, and have assembled a stack which now seems to me like a solid foundation for lab applications such as data processing. As a PhD student in the Greek reality, my budget was tight especially initially so i have made my basis mostly on the free vertex gemini trial. I have customized an existing gemini pipeline (thank you owndev) to better handle multi-round native", "context": "PhD student in Greece building lab AI tooling", "use_case": "self-hosted AI stack for labs", "switched_from": "", "story": "FORTHought: Self hosted AI stack for physics labs (and more) built on OpenWebUI"}, {"id": 748287536, "item_id": 46767971, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767971", "by": "turblety", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "warn", "quote": "the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me", "excerpt": "This looks great. I've been using OpenWebUI for a while now and the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has frustrated me. This looks like it's not only a better license, but also much better features.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM web UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS ChatGPT WebUI \u2013 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio Gen"}, {"id": 747629664, "item_id": 46726854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726854", "by": "aussieguy1234", "date": "2026-01-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "In Open WebUI I have different system prompts", "excerpt": "In Open WebUI I have different system prompts (startup advisor, marketing expert, expert software engineer etc) defined and I use Claude via OpenRouter. Is this going to get me banned? If so i'll switch to a different non-anthropic model.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI with custom system prompts", "switched_from": "", "story": "I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file"}, {"id": 746451312, "item_id": 46653207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653207", "by": "9cb14c1ec0", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts.", "excerpt": "I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "ChatGPT", "story": "Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT"}, {"id": 736769968, "item_id": 46048123, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048123", "by": "crocowhile", "date": "2025-11-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using openwebui which is under active development", "excerpt": "In a landscape where every week we have a different leading model, these systems are really useful for the power users because they keep the interface and models constant and allow to switch easily using API via openrouter or naga. I have been using openwebui which is under active development but I'll give this a try.", "context": "", "use_case": "chat UI for multiple models", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) \u2013 Open-source chat UI"}, {"id": 732896434, "item_id": 45806027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806027", "by": "stuxnet79", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I sort of lost interest in Open WebUI.", "excerpt": "It seems like the ecosystem around these tools has matured quite rapidly. I am somewhat familiar with Open WebUI, however, the last time I played around with it, I got the sense that it was merely a front-end to Ollama, the llm command line tool & it didn't have any capabilities outside of that. I got spooked when the Ollama team started monetizing so I ended up doing more research into llama.cpp and realized it coul", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat front-end", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 732786384, "item_id": 45799149, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799149", "by": "mythz", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "warn", "quote": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks", "excerpt": "They've switched to a custom license to inhibit competitive forks [1], in their own words [2]: [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_webui_is_no_longer_open_source/ [2] https://docs.openwebui.com/license/", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat UI", "switched_from": "", "story": "OSS Alternative to Open WebUI \u2013 ChatGPT-Like UI, API and CLI"}, {"id": 732554065, "item_id": 45784629, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784629", "by": "Weloveall", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use ollama in openwebui and llama3 in model.", "excerpt": "I use ollama in openwebui and llama3 in model. But I also have an ssh flask where I use an claude api.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM chat interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 732508579, "item_id": 45781786, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781786", "by": "Balinares", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Does Qwen3 Coder do a good job invoking its tools as appropriate for you? Under continue.dev at least, I've found I need to remind it constantly.", "context": "", "use_case": "LLM web interface", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 732481601, "item_id": 45780100, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780100", "by": "dnel", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama", "excerpt": "I recently picked up a Threadripper 3960x, 256GB DDR4 and RTX2080ti 11GB running Debian 13 and open web-ui w/ ollama. It runs well, not much difference to Claude etc but still learning the ropes and how to get the best out of it and local llms in general. Having tonnes of memory is nice for switching out models in ollama quickly since everything stays in cache. The GPU memory is the weak point though so I'm mostly us", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}, {"id": 732478097, "item_id": 45779881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779881", "by": "Greenpants", "date": "2025-11-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "my work laptop has its own Open WebUI account for separation", "excerpt": "I got a personal Mac Studio M4 Max with 128GB RAM for a silent, relatively power-efficient yet powerful home server. It runs Ollama + Open WebUI with GPT-OSS 120b as well as GLM4.5-Air (default quantisations). I rarely ever use ChatGPT anymore. Love that all data stays at home. I connect remotely only via VPN (my phone enables this automatically via Tasker). I'm 50% brainstorming ideas with it, asking critical questi", "context": "", "use_case": "local LLM frontend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop"}]}