Open WebUI

Open WebUI is the standard chat interface for running local AI models. If you have Ollama installed, this is what most people reach for to get a ChatGPT-style UI on top of it. It runs in Docker, connects to Ollama on startup, and gives you conversation history, model switching, document upload, and RAG — all running locally with no data leaving your machine.

The backend support goes beyond Ollama. Open WebUI works with any OpenAI-compatible API, which means you can point it at OpenAI, Anthropic, or a remote vLLM instance and use the same interface for all of them. That makes it practical as a unified front end whether you are running models locally or routing to a hosted API.

The feature set has grown considerably: tool calling, voice input and output, a plugin system, web search integration, multi-user accounts with role-based access, and RAG pipelines backed by a vector database. It is one of the fastest-moving projects in the self-hosted AI space.

The honest constraints: setup requires Docker and some familiarity with the tooling. RAG workloads against large documents are hardware-intensive — a machine with limited RAM will feel it. The default configuration handles small-team use well, but it is not designed for production multi-tenant deployments with many concurrent users. For teams that need governance and workspace isolation without DevOps overhead, AnythingLLM is the closer fit.

For anyone running Ollama who wants a proper interface rather than the API terminal, this is the obvious starting point.

Open WebUI: Pros & Cons