What I needed
A chat page that five people can log in to, that talks to the local models on the GPU box and to one hosted API, and that I do not have to babysit.
Install and accounts
One container, one volume for its data. The first account becomes the admin; new sign-ups wait for approval. Pointing it at Ollama on the same network took one setting.
Daily use
The chat itself is close to the hosted products people already know, which mattered more than any feature: nobody needed a walkthrough. Document chat worked well on PDFs of a few dozen pages and less well on scanned ones.
The licence
Since 2025 Open WebUI ships under its own licence: BSD 3-Clause terms plus a clause that stops you removing its branding for larger deployments. For a team of five it changes nothing. If you plan to rebrand it for clients, read it first.
Open WebUI beside two alternatives
Three self-hosted chat front ends, compared on what a small team asks for.
| Open WebUI | LibreChat | AnythingLLM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | Open WebUI License: BSD 3-Clause terms plus a branding clause | MIT | MIT |
| Install | One Docker container | Docker Compose with a database | Desktop app or Docker |
| Accounts and roles | Yes, with an admin panel | Yes | Yes, in the Docker version |
| Local models | Ollama built in; any OpenAI-style API | Any OpenAI-style API | Ollama and others |
| Chat with documents | Yes | Yes | Yes; its main focus |
| Verdict | Best all-round for a small team | Best if you want many hosted APIs in one place | Best for document Q&A on one desktop |
Licences checked against each project’s repository at the time of writing.
Upgrades
Two upgrades during the test, both a pull and a restart. Back up the data volume first; the database changes between versions.