Open WebUI: a ChatGPT-style interface for your self-hosted models

Running a model via Ollama from the command line is easy. Having other people use it — colleagues, family, or just yourself from your phone — needs an interface. Open WebUI has become the most widely adopted answer to that need.

What Open WebUI adds on top of plain Ollama

• A familiar chat interface, very close to ChatGPT: conversation history, model selection, document upload.
• Multi-user management with separate accounts — useful for sharing access to your self-hosted models without sharing a single session.
• Built-in RAG: connect a document base so the model can answer grounded in it, without complex external setup.
• Multi-backend compatible: Ollama first and foremost, but also any OpenAI-compatible API (including LiteLLM, see our dedicated article).

Why it matters for an agent stack

Open WebUI isn't just a chat app: it's often the first human touchpoint with a self-hosted agent stack. Many teams use it as a dashboard to quickly test a prompt or model before wiring it into a bigger n8n workflow.

Resource needs

Open WebUI itself is lightweight (a single Docker image); the real load comes from the model(s) served behind it (Ollama, or a remote LLM via API). If you point Open WebUI only at remote models, a small VPS is plenty.