# HuggingChat

> Hugging Face's open-source chat app for open AI models

HuggingChat is Hugging Face's chat app for open source AI models, hosted at huggingface.co/chat and built on the company's open-source Chat UI code. A router called Omni picks a model for each message, or you can choose one yourself from the model list, and models can call tools through MCP servers such as web search. It is free with a Hugging Face account up to a monthly usage allowance, which a Hugging Face PRO subscription raises.

- **Category:** AI Assistants
- **Made by:** Hugging Face (since 2023)
- **Website:** https://huggingface.co/chat
- **Runs on:** Web
- **Facts last checked:** Oct 5, 2026

## Pricing

HuggingChat has a free plan. Paid plans start at $9 per month (Hugging Face PRO).

- **Pricing model:** Free plan
- **Free plan:** Free with a Hugging Face account. Chats are billed as Inference Providers usage against $0.10 of monthly credits (subject to change); at the limit the app asks you to upgrade to PRO.
- **Free trial:** None listed.

| Plan | Price | What you get |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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. |

Read from https://huggingface.co/pricing on Oct 5, 2026. Prices change, so confirm with HuggingChat before buying.

## Key features

- **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.

## Good for

- 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

## Worth knowing

- 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.

## Works with

Exa, Hugging Face Hub, Hugging Face Jobs, Trackio

**Tags:** Chat assistant, AI search, AI agents, Open source, Self-hostable, AI features

## Alternatives

- [Open WebUI](https://toolgpa.com/tools/open-webui): Self-hosted chat interface for local and cloud AI models. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/huggingchat-vs-open-webui)
- [LibreChat](https://toolgpa.com/tools/librechat): Open-source, self-hosted chat interface for many AI providers. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/huggingchat-vs-librechat)
- [Poe](https://toolgpa.com/tools/poe): One app for chatting with AI models from many different labs. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/huggingchat-vs-poe)
- [Duck.ai](https://toolgpa.com/tools/duck-ai): Private, anonymized chat with third-party AI models. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/duck-ai-vs-huggingchat)
- [ChatGPT](https://toolgpa.com/tools/chatgpt): OpenAI's general-purpose AI assistant for chat, images and voice. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/chatgpt-vs-huggingchat)

## Sources

The prices, plans, platforms and features above were read from these pages on Oct 5, 2026:

- https://huggingface.co/pricing
- https://huggingface.co/chat
- https://huggingface.co/pro
- https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing
- https://huggingface.co/docs/chat-ui/index
- https://huggingface.co/docs/chat-ui/configuration/mcp-tools
- https://huggingface.co/docs/chat-ui/ml-intern/getting-started
- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui
- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui/blob/main/PRIVACY.md
- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui/blob/main/src/lib/components/SubscribeModal.svelte
- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui/blob/main/chart/env/prod.yaml
- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-macOS
- https://huggingface.co/terms-of-service
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/25/hugging-face-releases-its-own-version-of-chatgpt/

Page: https://toolgpa.com/tools/huggingchat
Listed by ToolGPA (toolgpa.com).