HuggingChat vs LibreChat

HuggingChat

• Trying many open source models from one chat window
• Hugging Face users who want to run Hub jobs and build Spaces from a chat
• Teams that want to self-host the same chat interface

LibreChat

• Teams that want a self-hosted chat interface they can audit and extend
• Organizations that need SSO and control over where chat data lives
• Using API keys from several model providers in one place

HuggingChat

• It runs in a browser only and needs a Hugging Face account. No mobile app is listed, and the GitHub repository of the earlier macOS app was archived on Dec 5, 2025.
• Free accounts get $0.10 of monthly inference credits, subject to change, and Hugging Face does not say how many messages that covers.
• There is no HuggingChat-only plan: more usage comes from Hugging Face PRO at $9 per month, which bundles storage and Spaces benefits, and from buying extra credits.
• Only open source models are offered, and requests run on third-party inference providers that apply their own security and data-handling policies.

LibreChat

• It is a self-hosted web application: the docs say there is no native Windows app or Linux AppImage, and no hosted paid plan is offered.
• You run it yourself with Docker, npm or a Helm chart and supply your own model API keys.
• The public demo at chat.librechat.ai is for evaluation only and is not meant for private data.
• The code interpreter, message search and file chat rely on extra services you deploy: a code-execution service, Meilisearch and the RAG API.

HuggingChat

Omni model router

Omni chooses a model for each message: image inputs go to a vision model, requests with MCP tools switched on go to a tools-capable model, and everything else follows a default route.

Catalog of open models

Instead of Omni you can chat with a specific model. The list showed 133 models when checked, including DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, Gemma and Llama releases.

MCP tools and web search

Models can call tools on MCP servers. Web Search (Exa) and a Hugging Face server are preconfigured, and you can add your own servers from the chat input or the settings.

ML Intern

An experimental mode that plans and runs machine-learning work on the Hugging Face Hub, such as finetuning or evaluating a model, within a compute budget you set for each conversation.

Image and voice input

Models that support vision accept image uploads, and the published production configuration turns on speech transcription with OpenAI's whisper-large-v3-turbo model.

Open source and self-hostable

The app runs on Chat UI, an Apache-2.0 SvelteKit project that can be run locally, with Docker or with Helm against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including Ollama and llama.cpp.

LibreChat

Many providers in one interface

Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure and AWS Bedrock out of the box, and custom endpoints add Ollama, Mistral AI, OpenRouter and other services.

Agents

Build custom assistants with tools, file handling, code execution and API actions without writing code.

Code Interpreter

Runs Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust and other languages in a sandbox. It is powered by an Apache 2.0 code-execution service that you deploy and point LibreChat at.

MCP and web search

Connects models to external tools through Model Context Protocol servers and gives any model live internet access with built-in search and reranking.

Artifacts and chat tools

Generates React components, HTML pages and Mermaid diagrams in chat, and supports forking, shareable links, temporary chats and importing conversations from ChatGPT.

Multi-user authentication

Sign-in through OAuth2, SAML or LDAP with two-factor authentication, plus an admin panel for users, roles and configuration, and moderation tools.

HuggingChat

• Free$0

  A free Hugging Face account with $0.10 of monthly inference credits, subject to change. HuggingChat shows an upgrade prompt once the message limit is reached.

• PRO$9

  per month

  Hugging Face PRO, not a HuggingChat-only plan: $2.00 of monthly credits (20x the free amount), pay-as-you-go beyond that, plus PRO storage and Spaces benefits.

• Team$20

  per user / month

  Hugging Face organization plan with $2.00 of monthly credits per seat, shared by members. HuggingChat usage can be billed to the organization.

• Enterprise$50

  per user / month, with annual commitments

  Everything in Team plus SCIM provisioning, the highest rate limits and managed billing. Bought through Hugging Face's sales team.

LibreChat

• Free$0

  The full self-hosted application, including agents, the code interpreter, MCP, web search and SSO, under the MIT license.