Open WebUI has been the default recommendation for anyone running a local LLM for a while now, and for good reason. It’s the closest thing to ChatGPT’s polish that you can self-host, and if you’re already using vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp, or any other local provider, spinning up Open WebUI takes just a few minutes with Docker. For a long time, though, I kind of saw it as the front-end you used despite its gaps, as it lacked a lot of features that you could get through other front-ends. It was great at serving a model through the browser, and it looked good, but it was always missing a handful of features you’d be giving up by not using a cloud option.