HuggingChat vs Open WebUI

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

Open WebUI

• Teams that want a chat interface running on their own infrastructure
• Using local models from Ollama through a browser interface
• Organizations that need SSO, roles and on-premises or air-gapped deployment

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.

Open WebUI

• There is no hosted service: you install and run it yourself with Docker, pip or Kubernetes, and supply your own models or provider API keys.
• Since v0.6.6 the license is not OSI-approved open source: deployments with more than 50 users must keep the Open WebUI branding unless they hold an enterprise license.
• The desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux is labeled early alpha, and the docs point production deployments to Docker or Python.
• Enterprise license prices are not published, and licenses are sold only to registered organizations, not individuals.

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.

Open WebUI

Any model in one interface

Chats with Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible provider. You can switch models mid-conversation or run two side by side to compare their answers.

Knowledge bases and RAG

Upload files and build knowledge bases searched with hybrid BM25 and vector search, or inject whole documents. The docs list 13 vector databases and 8 extraction engines.

Web search and code execution

Models can search the web and cite sources, and run Python in the browser or through Open Terminal, which gives the model a real terminal and filesystem to work in.

Tools, functions and MCP

Extend it with Python tools and pipelines, MCP servers and OpenAPI endpoints, or install prompts, models, tools and functions shared by the community.

Multi-user access control

Roles, groups and per-model permissions, with SSO through OIDC or LDAP, SCIM 2.0 provisioning and API keys for programmatic access.

Channels and notes

Channels are shared spaces where teammates and @-tagged models post in one timeline. Notes is an editor whose pages can be attached to a chat as context.

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.

Open WebUI

• Standard UseFree

  Self-hosted internal use with the original Open WebUI branding exactly intact. No enterprise agreement is needed.

• Enterprise UseCustom

  An enterprise license for white-labeling and rebranding, enterprise-only offerings such as Terminals, SLA support and Long-Term Support. Sold to registered organizations.