verifier.org

Open WebUI

the front-end everyone pairs with ollama, under a licence that caps you at fifty users unless you keep its branding.

free under 50 users#individuals#small-teams-who-will-kee#stay-under-the-user-thre

the most capable local chat interface there is, and the subtlest licensing trap in the category — source-available, endlessly called open source, and not.

as a product it is excellent: the most full-featured browser front-end for local models, actively developed, and it pairs with ollama, llama.cpp, localai or any openai-compatible backend. for most people running models locally with a nice interface, this is the interface.

the licence is a modified bsd-3-clause with an added branding clause. you may use it commercially only if open webui's branding stays intact — unless your deployment stays under 50 users in any rolling 30-day period, you obtain written permission, or you sign a paid enterprise licence. removing the branding without one is defined in the licence as a material breach.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

pricing
free under 50 users
website
github.com
our verdict

the most capable local chat interface there is, and the subtlest licensing trap in the category — source-available, endlessly called open source, and not.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more local llm tools

Text Generation WebUI

oobabooga's gradio interface for running local models and loaders

#open-source#gradio

vLLM

high-throughput serving engine you can run on your own gpu

#serving#throughput

MLX LM

apple's framework for running and fine-tuning models on apple silicon

#apple-silicon

Jan

we checked thisfree

gui, server and inference engine all apache 2.0 — the only tool here where every layer is genuinely open.

#anyone-who-wants-ollama-