[HN Gopher] OSS ChatGPT WebUI - 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini R...
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OSS ChatGPT WebUI - 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio
Gen
Author : mythz
Score : 123 points
Date : 2026-01-26 15:01 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (llmspy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (llmspy.org)
| mdrzn wrote:
| Posted 5 times in the last 7 days, today it finally got 29 points
| with 0 comments? Weird.
| mythz wrote:
| Most announcements slip through without notice, it only picks
| up votes when it hits the main page.
|
| v1 also took a while to make it to HN, v3 is a complete rewrite
| focused on extensibility with a lot more new features.
| digiown wrote:
| The few people looking at /new on HN are ridiculously
| overpowered. A few upvotes from them in the few hours will
| get you to the front page, and just 1-2 downvotes will make
| your post never see the light of day.
| freedomben wrote:
| You can't downvote a post, so that's not a factor.
|
| Also it's not as powerful as you think. In the past I have
| spent a lot of time looking at /new, and upvoting stories
| that I think should be surfaced. The vast majority of them
| still never hit near the front page.
|
| It's a real shame, because some of the best and most
| relevant submissions don't seem to make it.
| oceansweep wrote:
| You can absolutely downvote posts. You have to have a
| certain amount of karma before the option becomes
| available.
| digiown wrote:
| No I was wrong. You can't downvote posts. Flags are used
| instead, apparently.
| nebezb wrote:
| freedomben has 28k karma. I don't think the downvote
| button is coming.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| If you are in a company like e.g. ClickHouse and share a
| new HN Submission of ClickHouse via the internal Slack to
| #general, then you easily get enough upvotes for the
| front page.
| lukan wrote:
| What is stopping you from joining those "ridiculously
| overpowered people"?
| turblety wrote:
| This looks great. I've been using OpenWebUI for a while now and
| the weird licence and inability to just pay for branding has
| frustrated me.
|
| This looks like it's not only a better license, but also much
| better features.
| mythz wrote:
| Yep Open WebUI's switch to a non OSS license to inhibit
| competitive forks [1], in their own words [2] ensures I'll
| never use them. Happy to develop an OSS alternative that does
| the opposite whose rewrite on extensibility enables community
| extensions can replace built-in components and extensions so it
| can easily be rebranded and extended with custom UI + Server
| features.
|
| The goal is for the core main.py to be a single file without
| requiring additional dependencies, anything that does can be
| loaded as an extension (i.e. just a folder with .py server and
| UI hooks). There's also a script + docs so you can mix n' match
| the single main.py file and repackage it which whatever
| extensions you want included [3].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1kfhkal/open_we...
|
| [2] https://docs.openwebui.com/license/
|
| [3] https://llmspy.org/docs/deployment/custom-build
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Can this be used in a multi user scenario?
| mythz wrote:
| Yep, but it only supports GitHub OAuth. i.e. Content is either
| saved under no user (anonymous) or the authenticated GitHub
| User.
|
| https://llmspy.org/docs/deployment/github-oauth
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Thanks. Looks like this is purely to gatekeep internal
| access, but isn't ready for any oidc, or with a db backed
| session store.
|
| All the best for the project, will check in later on these..
| hobofan wrote:
| If you are looking for a open source Chat WebUI with
| support for OIDC, maybe you are interested in the one we
| are building?[0]
|
| We are leveraging oauth2-proxy for the login here, so it
| should support all OIDC-compliant IDPs, and there are some
| guides by oauth2-proxy on how to configure for all the
| bigger providers. We do have customers using it with e.g.
| Azure, Keycloak, Google Directory.
|
| [0]: https://erato.chat
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| I see you have a dockerfile.combined - is this built and
| served via gh artifacts? I can try it out.
|
| Pros: Open source, and focus on lightweight. This is
| good.
|
| Cons: "customers" - Ugh, no offense, but smells of going
| down the same path as "open" webui, with the services
| expanding to fill enterprise use cases, and simplicity
| lost.
|
| LLMs.py seems to be focussing purely on simplicity + OK
| with rewriting for it. this + 3bsd is solid ethos. Will
| await their story on multi-user, hosted app. They have
| most of the things sorted anyway, including RAG,
| extensions, etc.
| hobofan wrote:
| > I see you have a dockerfile.combined - is this built
| and served via gh artifacts? I can try it out.
|
| Our recommended way of deploying is via Helm[0] with
| latest version listed here[1].
|
| > with the services expanding to fill enterprise use
| cases, and simplicity lost.
|
| TBH, I don't think that simplicity was lost for OpenWebUI
| because of trying to fill enterprise needs. Their product
| has felt like a mess of too many cooks and no consistent
| product vision from the start. That's also where part of
| our origin story comes from: We started out as
| freelancers in the space and got inquiries to setup up a
| Chat UI for different companies, but didn't deem
| OpenWebUI and the other typical tools fit for the job,
| and too much of a mess internally to fork.
|
| We are small team (no VC funding), our customers end-
| users are usually on the low-end of AI literacy and there
| is about ~1 DevOps/sysadmin at the company our tool is
| deployed, so we have many factors pushing us towards
| simplicity. Our main avenue of monetization is also via
| SLAs, so a simple product for which we can more easily
| have test coverage and feel comfortable about the
| stability is also in our best interest here.
|
| [0]: https://erato.chat/docs/deployment/deployment_helm
|
| [1]: https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/erato/erato
| storystarling wrote:
| How are you handling the orchestration for the Computer Use
| agent? Is that running on LangGraph or did you roll a custom
| state machine? I've found managing state consistency in long-
| running agent loops to be the hardest part to get right reliably.
| mythz wrote:
| No custom state machine or agent, it's only a copy of
| Anthropic's 3 computer use tools: run_bash, edit, computer.
|
| https://github.com/ServiceStack/llms/tree/main/llms/extensio...
|
| It's run in the same process, there's no long agent loops,
| everything's encapsulated within a single message thread.
| chicagobuss wrote:
| why not just use llm by simon willison
| cyanydeez wrote:
| What is ChatGPT used in the title when it's clearly a much more
| flexible ui?
| mythz wrote:
| Couldn't think of a better title, do you have any suggestions?
| tiahura wrote:
| Do people really use claude code or any other agent with a paid
| api key? Why? Why wouldn't you just get Claude Max?
| mythz wrote:
| I wouldn't use Claude API Key pricing, but I also wouldn't get
| a Claude Max sub unless it was the only AI tool I used.
|
| Antigravity / Google AI Pro is much better value, been using it
| as my primary IDE assistant for a couple months and have yet to
| hit a quota limit on my $16/mo sub (annual pricing) which also
| includes a tonne of other AI perks inc. Nano Banana, TTS,
| NotebookLM, storage, etc.
|
| No need to use Anthropic's premium models for tool calling when
| Gemini/MiniMax are better value models that still perform well.
|
| I still have a Claude Pro plan, but I use it much less than
| Antigravity and thanks to Anthropic axing their sub usage, I no
| longer use it outside of CC.
| esperent wrote:
| Counterpoint: on the $20 monthly account I would hit my 5
| hour limits within an hour on antigravity. I end up spending
| half my time managing my context and keeping conversations
| short.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Rate limits mostly - plus claude code is a relatively recent
| thing but sonnet api has been around for a while with 3rd party
| apps (like cline). In those scenarios, it was only api.
| augusteo wrote:
| Curious about the MCP integration. Are people using this for
| production workloads or mostly experimentation?
| mythz wrote:
| MCP support is available via the fast_mcp extension:
| https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/fast_mcp
|
| I use llms .py as a personal assistant and MCP is required to
| access tools available via MCP.
|
| MCP is a great way to make features available to AI assistants,
| here's a couple I've created after enabling MCP support:
|
| - https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/gemini_gen_mcp - Give AI Agents
| ability to generate Nano Banana Images or generate TTS audio
|
| - https://llmspy.org/docs/mcp/omarchy_mcp - Manage Omarchy
| Desktop Themes with natural language
|
| I will say there's a noticable delay in using MCP vs tools,
| where I ended up porting Anthropic's node filesystem MCP to
| Python [1] to speed up common AI Assistant tasks, so their not
| ideal for frequent access of small tasks, but are great for
| long running tasks like Image/Audio generation.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/ServiceStack/llms/blob/main/llms/extensio...
| storystarling wrote:
| Does the MCP implementation make it easy to swap out the
| underlying image provider? I've found Gemini is still a bit
| hit or miss for actual print-on-demand products compared to
| Midjourney. Since MJ still doesn't have a real API I've been
| routing requests to Flux via Replicate for higher quality
| automated flows. Curious if I could plug that in here without
| too much friction.
| mythz wrote:
| MCP allows AI Models that doesn't support Image generation
| the ability to generate images/audio via tool calling.
|
| But you can just select the Image Generation model you
| prefer to use directly [1]. Currently supports Google, Open
| AI, OpenRouter, Chutes, Z.ai and Nvidia.
|
| I tried Replicate's MCP, but it looks like everything but
| generate images which I didn't understand, surely image
| generation would be its most sought after feature?
|
| [1] https://llmspy.org/docs/v3#image-generation-support
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(page generated 2026-01-27 10:01 UTC)