> Markdown twin of https://conduitllm.com/compare/open-webui.html > An Open WebUI alternative built as a native desktop app, not a bundled server. Checked 24 Sept 2026, including the rows Open WebUI wins. Free and open source. --- Comparison # Conduit vs Open WebUI We make one of these, so read this the way you would read any vendor comparison. Open WebUI is a genuinely strong product in a different shape from Conduit's — a multi-user server you run, not a single-user app you install — and it wins several rows below on its own terms. Open WebUI details were checked against its own documentation, GitHub repository, and licence on 24 September 2026 — if something has changed since, their sources are right and this page is wrong. ## The short answer **Use Open WebUI** if more than one person needs to reach the same AI setup — colleagues, students, a household — from whatever device they have open, with an admin who controls what models and tools each person can use. It is a mature, actively developed platform with real RAG, real server-side extensibility (Functions), and a real enterprise story once you outgrow the free tier's 50-user branding allowance. **Use Conduit** if it is just you, and you would rather not run anything at all — no container, no port, no admin account, no server database to run. Install it, paste in your own API key, and it's stored in the OS keychain and sent only to the provider you chose — never through anyone else's server. There is nothing to operate, because there is no service. ## Side by side | | Conduit | Open WebUI | | --- | --- | --- | | What it is | A native desktop application. Install it and it runs — nothing else to stand up | A self-hosted web application. You run the backend, then open it in a browser | | How you install it | One installer per OS (Windows/macOS/Linux); nothing else required | Docker (the documented default), pip/uv/conda, Kubernetes via Helm, Podman, or a downloadable desktop build that bundles the same server | | Reach it from another device | No — one machine, one local install, by design | **Yes** — any browser on the network once the server is running, including phones | | Multiple people, one install | No accounts, no multi-user model — it is one person's app | **Yes** — admin-managed sign-in with Admin/User/Pending roles, groups, and additive permissions | | Model providers | 17 built-in adapters (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, OpenCode Zen, Groq, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, Z.ai, Moonshot AI, Qwen, Together AI, Fireworks AI, LM Studio, Ollama, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint) | Ollama plus OpenAI-, Anthropic-, and OpenAI-compatible connections you configure per server | | Managing local Ollama models | Lists and chats with models you already pulled; pulling and deleting stays in Ollama | Same division of labour as Conduit's Ollama row — the admin still pulls/deletes through Ollama itself | | MCP support | Local servers over stdio, supervised as child processes with per-tool consent; remote servers over Streamable HTTP with OAuth. No proxy needed for either | Native support is Streamable HTTP only, registered once by an admin; stdio/SSE servers need `mcpo`, an official proxy, in front of them first | | Chat with your own documents | Documents collections: text, Markdown, CSV, Word, PDF, parsed on-device, hybrid vector plus keyword search in local SQLite. Indexing sends a document's full text to whichever provider embeds it — OpenAI, Gemini, or OpenRouter — unless that provider is Ollama, which stays fully on-device | **More mature** — documented vector database support (Qdrant, Milvus, and pgvector, with ChromaDB as the default), pluggable extraction engines including Apache Tika and Docling, hybrid search, and agentic retrieval where the model decides what to search for | | Extensibility | MCP connectors and a fixed set of built-in tools (web search, fetch, documents, clipboard, calculator, time) | **Broader** — Functions (Pipes, Filters, Tools) run in-process on the server; the older Pipelines system, which needed a separate worker container, is now legacy. Plus MCP and OpenAPI tool servers | | Voice and code execution | No voice mode; no code-execution sandbox | **Yes** — configurable speech-to-text/text-to-speech voice mode, and a Code Interpreter that runs Python via Pyodide or a connected Jupyter server | | Where your API key lives | The OS keychain, read only by Conduit's Rust core — never sent to us, never in the browser layer | On the server you run, in its configuration/environment and database | | Where conversations live | A SQLite database on your own disk. Nothing proxied through infrastructure we run | Your server's database — shared storage by design, since that's what lets every user reach it | | Licence | AGPL-3.0-only, no user-count threshold, no branding clause | A custom BSD-based licence that requires keeping Open WebUI's name/logo intact past 50 end users in 30 days, unless you have written permission or an enterprise licence | | Ship it under your own brand | Runtime theming today; build-time packaging into your own installer is early access | Free up to 50 users in a rolling 30 days; an Enterprise licence is required above that | | Enterprise tier | None — no accounts or hosted service exist to sell one for | **Yes** — SSO/LDAP/SCIM, multi-node high availability, and SOC 2/HIPAA/GDPR/FedRAMP/ISO 27001 documentation, contact-sales pricing | ## Where Open WebUI is better **It was built for more than one person.** Roles, groups, and per-resource permissions ship in the free, open-source app — an admin account, invited or self-registered users, and additive group permissions for things like image generation or specific models. This is not a bolted-on feature; it's the reason Open WebUI exists as a server at all. **Reachable from anything with a browser.** Stand up one instance and every device on the network — a laptop, a phone, a shared kiosk — can use it, once someone signs in. Conduit has no answer to this by design: it's a single-machine install with no account system and no way to reach it from a second device. **Retrieval is genuinely more mature.** Documented vector database support — Qdrant, Milvus, and pgvector, with ChromaDB as the default — pluggable extraction engines including Apache Tika and Docling, and agentic retrieval where the model itself decides what to search for. Conduit's Documents feature covers the common file types with hybrid vector and keyword search in a single local SQLite database, but it's a newer, narrower implementation by comparison, and only Ollama keeps the embedding step on-device. **Functions make it a platform, not just a client.** Pipes, Filters, and Tools run in-process on the server — rewriting prompts, calling external services, adding guardrails — on top of MCP and OpenAPI tool servers. The older Pipelines system, which needed a separate worker container, is now legacy, superseded by Functions. Conduit's extensibility stops at MCP connectors and a fixed built-in toolset; there's no script you can drop in to change how a request is handled. **Voice mode and a code interpreter, out of the box.** Speech-to-text and text-to-speech, with a choice of engines, plus a Code Interpreter that executes Python via Pyodide in the browser or a connected Jupyter server. Conduit has neither — its calculator tool does arithmetic, not arbitrary code. **A community and an ecosystem to match.** Open WebUI has been building this for years, with a large contributor base, an official companion proxy (`mcpo`) for bridging MCP transports, and a documented alternatives/enterprise track. Conduit is a release candidate; Open WebUI is an established platform other tools integrate against. ## Where Conduit is better **Nothing to host.** No Docker, no port to open, no server database to run, no server to patch. Open WebUI's own quick-start recommends Docker and documents Python 3.11/3.12 support specifically (3.13 isn't supported yet) for the pip route — real operational surface, even for one person. Conduit is an installer; there's no backend because there's nothing running as a service. (Conduit still writes a local SQLite file, which is worth backing up — there's just no server process managing it.) **Your key never touches a browser tab or a server config.** Conduit stores provider keys in the OS keychain and reads them only from its Rust core — the UI layer never sees them, and the key is sent only to the provider you configured it for. Open WebUI's keys live in the server you run, wherever its configuration and database happen to sit; reasonable for a platform meant to be shared, but a different trust boundary than a key that's read only on-device and sent only to the provider you chose. **Desktop-native, not a browser wearing an app icon.** Open WebUI's own desktop build is a real, useful convenience — but it still runs the same backend locally and is, by its own architecture, a web application first. Conduit was built as a desktop app from the start: native windows, OS-level file dialogs, and no server and no browser tab in between. **Rebrandable without a user-count clock running.** Open WebUI's own licence lets you remove its branding for free only under 50 end users in any rolling 30 days — cross that and an enterprise licence is required to stay compliant. Conduit's AGPL-3.0 licence has no such threshold: runtime theming works today regardless of how many people you put it in front of. Conduit's own build-time packaging into a fully custom installer is still an early-access programme, not a finished feature — see [the white-label page](https://conduitllm.com/whitelabel.html) for exactly what that covers today. **Simple by not trying to be a platform.** One person, one install, one model at a time behind a clean window — no roles to configure, no pipeline to write, no admin panel to learn first. If Open WebUI's team features are more surface area than you need, [a BYOK desktop client](https://conduitllm.com/use-cases/bring-your-own-key.html) is a smaller thing to reason about. ## What Conduit does not do - No multi-user accounts, roles, or shared access — it's a single-user client, full stop - No way to reach it from a second device or a browser — it's local to the machine it's installed on - No Python pipelines or server-side scripting — extensibility is MCP connectors and a fixed built-in toolset - No hosted RAG at Open WebUI's scale — no choice of vector database backend, no agentic retrieval - No voice mode (speech-to-text/text-to-speech) and no code-execution sandbox - No enterprise licence, no SSO/LDAP/SCIM, no compliance paperwork — there's no server to attach any of that to - No code-signed installers yet — first launch shows a SmartScreen or Gatekeeper warning ## Which one should you install? If you're standing up AI access for a team, a classroom, or a household — people who each need their own login, reachable from whatever device they're holding — Open WebUI is doing exactly what it was built to do, and Conduit has no equivalent. If you're one person who wants a model behind your own key, on your own machine, with nothing to operate and a key that's stored in the OS keychain and sent only to the provider you chose, that's Conduit's whole reason for existing. Plenty of people end up with both: Open WebUI for the shared instance, Conduit for a private one where BYOK and MCP matter more than sign-in. Evaluating MCP clients more broadly? [Best MCP clients, compared](https://conduitllm.com/best-mcp-clients.html) lines up desktop, self-hosted, and IDE-shaped clients side by side, including where Open WebUI's Streamable-HTTP-only native support and its `mcpo` proxy fit in. [Download Conduit](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit/releases) More comparisons: [all Conduit comparisons](https://conduitllm.com/compare.html), including [Conduit vs TypingMind](https://conduitllm.com/compare/typingmind.html), [Conduit vs Chatbox](https://conduitllm.com/compare/chatbox.html), and [Conduit vs LM Studio](https://conduitllm.com/compare/lm-studio.html). ## Questions **Does Open WebUI have a desktop app?** Yes. Alongside the server you run with Docker or pip, Open WebUI ships a downloadable desktop build for macOS, Windows, and Linux that bundles the same backend so it starts without Docker, a terminal, or manual setup. It can run fully offline with a local model or point at a remote Open WebUI server. It is still the Open WebUI application — a local server with a browser-based UI in front of it — packaged as an installer, not a different architecture. Conduit has no server component at all; there is nothing running in the background to point a browser at. **Does Open WebUI support MCP?** Yes, natively since v0.6.31, but over Streamable HTTP only — an admin registers a server once under Settings → Admin → Integrations and users enable its tools per chat. Open WebUI's own docs give the reason: it is "a web-based, multi-tenant environment, not a local desktop process," so long-lived stdio or SSE connections are impractical to hold open across many users and sessions. Stdio- or SSE-based MCP servers still work, through `mcpo`, an official proxy that translates them into OpenAPI endpoints first. Conduit runs MCP servers over local stdio directly, as supervised child processes with per-tool consent, alongside remote Streamable HTTP with OAuth — no proxy needed for either. **Can I remove Open WebUI's branding from my deployment?** Only in limited cases. Open WebUI's licence prohibits "altering, removing, obscuring, or replacing" its name, logo, or other identifiers, with three exceptions: deployments serving 50 or fewer end users in any rolling 30-day period, written permission from the copyright holder, or a purchased enterprise licence. Past 50 users, keeping the software free means keeping the branding. Conduit's AGPL-3.0 licence carries no user-count threshold or branding clause — runtime theming (name, logo, colours) is built in today, though build-time packaging into your own installer is still an early-access programme rather than a finished feature. See [the white-label page](https://conduitllm.com/whitelabel.html) for exactly what that covers. **Is Open WebUI free?** The self-hosted software is free and open source under its own licence. A separate Enterprise licence, sold through a contact-sales process with no public price, adds white-labelling and rebranding beyond the 50-user threshold, federated SSO/LDAP/SCIM authentication, multi-node high-availability clustering, and compliance documentation (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, ISO 27001). Conduit is free either way: there is no paid tier, no account, and no enterprise SKU, because there is no service being hosted for you to pay for. **Can several people share one Open WebUI or Conduit install?** That is the core design difference. Open WebUI is built for it: one server, an admin account, and per-user sign-in with roles (Admin, User, Pending), groups, and additive permissions, reachable from any device's browser once the server is running. Conduit has no accounts and no multi-user model at all — it is one person's install, on one machine, with one local database. Sharing a model or an MCP server across a team is Open WebUI's job; a private, single-user client with keys in the OS keychain is Conduit's. **Is Conduit affiliated with Open WebUI?** No. Conduit is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Open WebUI Inc. "Open WebUI" is their name and mark, used here only to describe their product accurately. Sources for the Open WebUI rows, checked 24 September 2026: [the Open WebUI homepage](https://openwebui.com/), [quick-start / installation docs](https://docs.openwebui.com/getting-started/quick-start/), [MCP support documentation](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/extensibility/mcp/), [role-based access control documentation](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/authentication-access/rbac/), [RAG and vector database documentation](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/chat-conversations/rag/), [the Pipelines page](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/extensibility/pipelines/) (documented as superseded by Functions), [voice/audio documentation](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/chat-conversations/audio/), [Code Interpreter documentation](https://docs.openwebui.com/features/chat-conversations/chat-features/code-execution/), [the Enterprise page](https://docs.openwebui.com/enterprise), [the desktop app repository](https://github.com/open-webui/desktop), and [the project's LICENSE file](https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/blob/main/LICENSE). Conduit rows are checkable against [the documentation](https://conduitllm.com/docs.html) and [the source](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit). Found an error? [Tell us](https://github.com/runningpixels/conduit/discussions) and we will fix it. ## Related - [Conduit vs Msty](https://conduitllm.com/compare/msty.html) — A Msty alternative? Conduit vs Msty Studio, checked 3 Oct 2026 — licence, pricing, local models, MCP, and the rows Msty wins. Free and open source. - [Conduit vs Chatbox](https://conduitllm.com/compare/chatbox.html) — A Chatbox alternative? Conduit vs Chatbox, checked 3 Oct 2026 — licence, pricing, MCP, local models, mobile, and the rows Chatbox wins. Free and open source. - [Conduit vs TypingMind](https://conduitllm.com/compare/typingmind.html) — A TypingMind alternative? Conduit vs TypingMind, checked 24 Sept 2026: a free, open-source desktop app vs a paid-licence web app, and the rows TypingMind wins. - [Conduit vs LM Studio](https://conduitllm.com/compare/lm-studio.html) — Conduit vs LM Studio, checked 24 Sept 2026: LM Studio runs local models; Conduit is a free, open-source app for them and cloud models. Why many run both. - [Conduit vs Ollama's own app](https://conduitllm.com/compare/ollama.html) — Ollama ships its own chat app now. What it does, what a separate client adds, and why most people end up running both rather than choosing. - [Best MCP clients, compared](https://conduitllm.com/best-mcp-clients.html) — Which MCP client should you install? A checkable comparison of the desktop apps that speak MCP — Conduit, Claude Desktop, Cherry Studio, Jan and LM Studio. - [Conduit vs Claude Desktop](https://conduitllm.com/compare/claude-desktop.html) — A checkable comparison of Conduit and Claude Desktop — models, storage, MCP setup, platforms, licence and code signing, by the people who make one of them.