In today’s world of AI models it’s easy to get lost. You have ChatGPT for some tasks, Claude for others, you want to experiment locally with Llama 3, and for coding — use a specialized model. The result is a desktop turned into chaos of browser tabs and applications.

What if there were a single unified interface that could connect to all those models? A place where you can easily switch between GPT-4o, a local Llama 3 and dozens of other models?

That place exists — and it’s called Open Web UI.

🚀 What is Open Web UI

In short, Open Web UI is an open-source, locally installable web interface for working with large language models (LLM). It is fully self-hosted and can work offline without relying on external servers.

Imagine a ChatGPT-like interface, but with superpowers. The project started as Ollama WebUI — a convenient “wrapper” for Ollama — a tool that lets you run LLMs on your computer. However, the project soon evolved into a full-fledged platform.

Today Open Web UI is a single pane of glass, allowing you to:

• chat with models running locally (via Ollama or a built-in inference engine);
• connect to cloud APIs (OpenAI, Mistral AI, GroqCloud, etc.);
• use aggregator services like OpenRouter.ai.

Install once (via Docker, Kubernetes or pip), then access through your browser. It’s your personal, customizable AI hub, supporting mobile devices and offline access (PWA on localhost).

🤔 Why you might need it

“Why do I need this if there is the ChatGPT website?” The answer is in flexibility, control and functionality.

As of November 2025 Open Web UI has thousands of stars on GitHub and an active community. Here are the key reasons why this tool deserves attention.

1. All models in one place

The main idea — no more jumping between tabs. In Open Web UI you can add all your connections:

• Local Ollama — fast, free and fully private responses.
• OpenAI API — access to the latest GPT models.
• OpenRouter — a single access point to many other models.
• Mistral AI, GroqCloud, LMStudio — via custom OpenAI-compatible URLs.

Before starting a chat simply choose a model from the dropdown. You can even hold conversations with multiple models at once to compare their responses.

2. The magic of local models and Ollama

Open Web UI pairs perfectly with Ollama — a tool for running LLMs locally.

What is Ollama? It’s a utility that makes it easy to download and run models (Llama 3, Mistral, Phi-3, Gemma 2, etc.) on Windows, macOS and Linux. Ollama pulls models from Hugging Face and optimizes them for your hardware.

Benefits of a local approach:

• Privacy — data never leaves your machine.
• Cost-free — no tokens or subscriptions, just your machine’s resources.
• Speed — smaller models respond instantly.

Open Web UI provides a visual interface to manage models: install, remove, create custom ones, chat with them and even use a Model Builder.

3. Chat with your documents (RAG)

Open Web UI supports Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This means you can:

• upload PDFs, TXTs, MDs, images and other files;
• “attach” them to the chat using #;
• ask questions about the content.

This way you can analyze reports, search information in long documents, or train models on your knowledge base. It works offline too. If desired, RAG can be extended with web search via SearXNG, Brave, Google PSE or DuckDuckGo. To analyze websites just enter #URL.

4. Advanced capabilities

• Multimodality: upload images and have video-chat with support for LLaVA and GPT-4o.
• Image generation: via DALL-E, Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111), ComfyUI or local plugins.
• Customization: create “personas”, system prompts, BYOF (Bring Your Own Function) — connecting Python functions to LLM.
• Collaboration: multi-user mode, role-based access (RBAC), SCIM 2.0 integration with Okta, Azure AD.
• Other: full support for Markdown, LaTeX, i18n, offline mode (HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1), Enterprise options with SLA.

💎 OpenRouter.ai — a model aggregator

If local models aren’t suitable (or your PC can’t handle Llama 3), OpenRouter.ai solves this problem.

OpenRouter is an API aggregator service that brings together dozens of models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral AI, Cohere, etc.) in one place.

You simply:

1. Sign up at OpenRouter.ai.
2. Get one API key.
3. Top up your balance and use any supported models.

Open Web UI supports OpenRouter out of the box via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Enter your key, and GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini 1.5 Pro and other models appear in the list. This way you can switch between local and cloud AIs without changing interfaces.

🛠️ Installing Open Web UI

The most reliable method is Docker.

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

For GPU add --gpus all and use the :cuda tag. If you want Ollama inside the container — use the :ollama tag with -v ollama:/root/.ollama.

After starting open http://localhost:3000 and create an admin.

Then:

• in Settings → Connections add Ollama (http://host.docker.internal:11434);
• add your OpenRouter API key and choose it as an OpenAI-compatible source.

For updates you can use Watchtower:

docker run --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containrrr/watchtower --run-once open-webui

Or install directly:

pip install open-webui
open-webui serve

🏁 Conclusion

Open Web UI grew from a simple wrapper for Ollama into a powerful, flexible and fully autonomous AI control center. It unites private local models and cloud APIs, removing the chaos of tabs and interfaces.

The project is rapidly evolving: it supports RAG, plugins, pipelines and enterprise features, making it suitable for both enthusiasts and businesses.

This is your AI — on your terms.