ChatGPT vs Open WebUI
ChatGPT and Open WebUI are both AI assistants software. ChatGPT is a commercial product from OpenAI. Open WebUI is open source under a license set out in its repository, with 158k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick ChatGPT when
- You want the most widely used general AI assistant, with business plans that keep your data out of training.
- Pick Open WebUI when
- You run local or private models and want a full-featured chat front end for yourself or a team.
Side by side
OpenAI's AI assistant for chat, writing, coding, image generation, web search, file analysis and agent tasks, with Team and Enterprise plans.
A self-hosted web interface for chatting with local models through Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible API, with RAG, tools, user management and pipelines.
Answers can be confidently wrong, and staff using personal accounts can leak company data.
Its custom licence restricts removing Open WebUI branding for larger deployments, and it is still pre-1.0.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server
Not published
Python, Svelte and SvelteKit
Closed source, sold by OpenAI
Open source, license unclear on GitHub
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.
731k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
158k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 3 years ago, latest release v0.12.5.
Other comparisons
More AI assistants
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.