LibreChat
MIT-licensed chat app with multi-user support, popular with developers.
Locul / Compare / Open WebUI alternative
Open WebUI alternative for firms that should not have to run it themselves.
Open WebUI is the best-known self-hosted chat app, with serious team features. It also needs someone to host it, patch it, back it up and switch on the logging. If that someone does not exist at your firm, a managed private workspace gives you the same privacy without the pager.
The short answer
Open WebUI is a self-hosted web app for chatting with local and cloud models, with groups, LDAP, SCIM and SSO. You run and secure the server yourself. Since v0.6.6 it uses its own licence with a branding clause, so it is no longer OSI open source.
Locul is a managed private workspace on dedicated servers in the UK, the EU or your building, set up and kept running by a partner or by us, with a full audit log and an approval step built in.
Credit where it is due
Where Open WebUI shines.
Of the self-hosted chat apps, Open WebUI has the deepest team features. If you have the people to run it, it is a serious option.
- User groups, per-model access, LDAP and Active Directory, SCIM provisioning and OIDC sign-in
- Works with Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible API
- Document search with a wide choice of vector databases, hybrid search and reranking
- MCP and OpenAPI tools, and prompts that run on a schedule
- Very active development and a large community
Signs you have outgrown it
When a team needs more than Open WebUI.
These are the reasons teams give for moving off a self-run Open WebUI. Most are about running it, not the app itself.
An update broke it again
Fast releases mean frequent migrations. When one fails, chats and the document index can go with it.
The audit question came up
The audit log is off by default and leaves chat content out unless someone configures it.
The licence changed under you
From v0.6.6 the Open WebUI License requires the branding to stay, unless you have 50 or fewer users, written permission or an enterprise licence.
Nobody wants to be on call
Support comes from the community, or from an enterprise licence. Either way, your team still runs the server.
Side by side
Open WebUI vs Locul for a 20 to 150 person firm.
Checked against Open WebUI's own website and documentation in October 2026. Products change quickly, so check anything that matters to you on their site too.
| Open WebUI | Locul | |
|---|---|---|
| Who hosts and patches it | You | A certified partner or Locul, on servers reserved for you |
| Licence | Open WebUI License, with a branding clause from v0.6.6 | Commercial, per seat |
| Sign-in and groups | OIDC, LDAP, SCIM and groups | Single sign-on available, permissions follow your files |
| Audit log | Off by default, chats excluded by default | On, covering every question, answer and file used |
| Document search | Many vector database options, you maintain the index | One team brain over your drives and wiki, maintained for you |
| Approval before anything leaves | Not found | Every email or post a bot drafts waits for a person |
| Ready-made bots for office work | Build your own | Inbox triage, invoice chasing, file checks and more |
| Support | Community, or an enterprise licence | A named partner in your country, or Locul |
Fair summary: Open WebUI gives you more control and costs nothing to license internally with the branding kept. Locul costs more and takes the running of it off your hands. The right choice depends on whether you have, and want to keep, the people to run it.
The difference in one question
A shared brain knows which file is the live one.
A desktop AI app only knows the files on one person's laptop. A team workspace knows the shared folders, who may open them, and what happened to each version.
Jonas, Sales, Hamburg office
kurze Frage, which version of the Halvorsen framework agreement is the live one?? Lena says v7 but the folder has v7_final, v7_final_FINAL and 'v8 DRAFT do not send'. Customer wants the liability cap clause by 3pm their time, so 2pm ours.
The live one is v7_final_FINAL, signed 2 September 2026. v7_final was replaced the same day after Halvorsen's legal team changed the payment terms in clause 9. 'v8 DRAFT' is a proposal from Lena from October and has not been agreed.
The liability cap is clause 14.2: 150% of the fees paid in the previous 12 months, excluding data protection claims, which are uncapped.
v7_final_FINAL.pdf (signed)Email, M. Berg, 2 SeptLena's note, 14 Oct
An example. The company, customer and people are invented.
Other Open WebUI alternatives
Not every team needs Locul.
If you are one person, or you have an engineer who wants to run it, one of these may suit you better.
AnythingLLM
MIT-licensed, strong on documents. See our AnythingLLM comparison.
Onyx
Enterprise search and chat across company apps, self-hosted or cloud.
Our honest take
Good software. Ask who will run it in year two.
We like Open WebUI, and plenty of firms should use it. The honest question is not whether it is good, but whether your firm wants to own a server, its updates, its backups, its audit settings and its licence terms for years. If the answer is no, Locul gives you the same data privacy with someone else carrying that work.
The Office AI Benchmark
We test open models on real office work: messy emails, spreadsheets with broken formulas, forwarded chains with the ask buried in paragraph four. See how close they get to the big cloud models.
Open WebUI alternative questions
Asked by teams before they switch.
Is Open WebUI free?
Yes for internal use with the Open WebUI branding kept. Removing the branding needs 50 or fewer users in any 30-day period, written permission, or an enterprise licence.
Is Open WebUI still open source?
Versions up to v0.6.5 are BSD-3-Clause. From v0.6.6 it uses the Open WebUI License, which its own documentation says is not an OSI-approved open-source licence. The source code is still public.
Is Open WebUI any good?
Yes. It has the deepest team features of the self-hosted chat apps, including groups, LDAP and SCIM. The work is in hosting, patching and securing it.
Which is better, LibreChat or Open WebUI?
Both are good self-hosted chat apps. LibreChat is MIT-licensed and developer-friendly; Open WebUI has more admin features. Both need someone to run them.
Keep comparing
Other tools teams move from.
Next step
See Locul doing your team's real work.
One call. We set up a demo on files like yours, so you can compare it with Open WebUI side by side.
- One shared workspace for the whole firm
- Runs in the UK, the EU or your building
- Set up and kept running for you